Moon Over Buffalo at The Playhouse, Wilson, NC

Comic relief at 'Moon Over Buffalo'The Playhouse 2006-07 season concludes with a comic invention, running gags and a superb sense of absurdity in "Moon Over Buffalo."The cast includes some familiar faces to The Playhouse audiences along with several newcomers.Ken Ludwig's backstage farce presents a modern-day comedy of errors as it focuses on a hapless acting company in which things constantly go wrong. The era is the early 1950s, and the main characters, George (played by Jacob McCraw) and Charlotte Hay (played by Eraine Oakley), are a down-at-the-heels theatrical couple still performing old-fashioned repertory in Buffalo, N.Y.The Hays think nothing of doing "Cyrano de Bergerac" with a cast of five (that's all they can afford) and run it in repertory with "Private Lives."It never seems to have occurred to Charlotte that — with a daughter in her 20s — maybe she's a trifle too old to play Roxanne opposite her husband's Cyrano.Their daughter, Roz (Nell De Mattia) is trying to break away from the theater and her former boyfriend, Paul (Larry High) so she can have a more "normal" life.Their lawyer (Dennis Rutter) is smitten with Charlotte and the company ingénue (Gray Deans Wharton) is pregnant by George. Add to this mix an almost deaf grandmother (Kathy Creech) and a forgetful fiancée (Greg Davis) and things really get complicated.The original Broadway production was called "wildly funny" by ABC News. Author Ludwig has had several Broadway and London hits. His "Crazy for You" won the Tony, Olivier, and Drama Desk awards as Best Musical of the Year.His "Lend Me a Tenor" won two Tonys and an Outer Critics Circle Award. On Broadway, "Moon Over Buffalo" starred Carol Burnett and, later, Lynn Redgrave.