The Hippodrome Theatre’s latest play, which begins previews tonight, is a hilarious romp that pokes fun at divorcees, dentists, angst-ridden teens and, well, life in general.
First things first. The Hippodrome Theatre’s latest stage production is called Women in Jeopardy! Don’t confuse it with Women on Jeopardy! That would probably star Alex Trebek and have a certain level of sophistication that the popular game show is known for.
Spoiler alert: There is nothing sophisticated about Women in Jeopardy!
And thank goodness for that. In a Hippodrome season that has included such heavyweight dramas as All Girl Frankenstein and Collected Stories, Women in Jeopardy! is staged strictly for laughs. Lots of guilty-pleasure laughs courtesy of writer Wendy MacLeod.
During an early run-through of the play, director Lauren Warhol Caldwell instructed those in the audience: “Feel free to laugh inappropriately.”
The mainstage play, which has discounted preview performances tonight and Thursday leading up to Friday’s Opening Night, follows three midlife divorcees who’ve all but resigned themselves to mundane lives of fun-runs and book clubs rather than romance. That is, until one of women falls madly in love with her oddball dentist.
Throw in a couple of hormonal teenagers, a missing hygienist, a detective who’s a doppelganger for the dentist, and you have a comedy that will have you grinning, groaning, giggling and guffawing. (Whoever thought you could build laughs around dental floss, a bundt pan, Hungarian goulash, granola bars and, umm, pitching a tent?)
“Women are always desperate to marry doctors,” Liz (Lija Fisher) says to her friends over glasses of wine. “Why not dentists?”
Mary (Stephanie Lynge) and Jo (Carolyn Pool) roll their eyes and try to convince their friend that this dentist is a “total freak.” After all, Dr. Jackson Scull allegedly has a torture chamber of antique dental instruments in his basement and wears a ski mask in public.
Dr. Scull is perhaps the most misunderstood dentist since the sadistic Dr. Orin Scrivello from Little Shop of Horrors.
But Liz is smitten with Jackson (Matthew Lindsay), who everyone seems to agree resembles actor Christopher Walken. (And that’s a good thing?)
“My hips swivel when I walk,” Liz swoons. “There has been a renaissance of my nether parts!”
Jackson makes Liz’s friends cringe when he says such creepy things as, “It’s always interesting when a woman is under anesthesia.”
Liz sees nothing wrong with allowing her precocious daughter, Amanda (Michele Dalia), to go on a weekend camping excursion with Jackson. Fearing for Amanda’s safety, Mary and Jo channel their best Lucy and Ethel to sabotage the pending wilderness trip.
An overly concerned Mary seeks the help of Amanda’s ex-boyfriend, a snowboarder burnout named Trenner (Logan Wolfe). The teenager, however, seems to have trouble focusing.
“Isn’t it weird that they have wet T-shirt contests but not wet blouse contests?” Trenner ponders.
The lad has a thing for Mary’s homemade Hungarian goulash (made with plenty of “poop-rika”)—and a thing for Mary. He reminds her in dude-speak that “We’re both at the peak of our sexual powers.”
Mary, however, has the hots for a flirtatious police detective, Sgt. Kirk Sponsullar (also played by Lindsay), who’s hot on the case of the ill-fated hygienist.
“Mary, do you have a firearm of any kind?” the smooth-talking sleuth asks.
“Of course not,” she responds, “I’m a Democrat.”
All the silliness leads up to the denouement camping trip in which the Hippodrome stage is ingeniously transformed from a kitchen into a remote campsite in the matter of a minute. And the great outdoors is where Women in Jeopardy! draws to a zany, if somewhat uneven, conclusion.
Lynge, last seen at the Hippodrome as Astrid in The Snow Queen, said she identifies with her Mary character in Women in Jeopardy!
“Her girls [Jo and Liz] are her team—her village,” said Lynge, who is also the Hippodrome’s artistic associate. “These women are whole people, and that’s really lovely to see on stage. That’s really the main character of the play—the women and their friendship.”
Fisher, who plays the infatuated Liz, is making her Hippodrome debut. The Colorado-based actor describes her character as a “delightful bubble of energy.”
“I see Liz as a very hopeful woman who went through a divorce and after a long dry spell has found love and lust again,” Fisher said. “She’s not always the sharpest tool in the shed, but she makes up for it with a positive outlook on life.”
Lindsay said that his Dr. Scull character reminds him of someone he knew in high school.
“No one understood him and he was unkempt, but he was a genuinely nice person,” Lindsay said. “Dr. Scull is like that only because other people don’t behave like he does.”
Lindsay has the added duty of playing Sgt. Sponsullar.
“He is a no-nonsense guy with a dry sense of humor and his own oddities,” Lindsay said.
Like Lindsay and Lynge, Logan Wolfe is a member of the Hippodrome Acting Company. He calls his Trenner character “a force of nature.”
“He’s completely oblivious to everything around him, and he loves women,” said Wolfe, whose lankiness and physical moves add to Trenner’s appeal. “I can do basically whatever I want to do with him.”
In addition to Fisher, Carolyn Pool and Michele Dalia are Hippodrome newcomers. Pool hails from Minneapolis, where she has performed all over the Twin Cities. Dalia is a New Jersey native who studied drama with the Stella Adler Summer Conservatory.
“We all became bosom chums within the first couple days of rehearsals,” Wolfe said. “We all started feeling like a family very quick.”
— Noel Leroux
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Women in Jeopardy!
Hippodrome State Theatre
25 SE 2nd Place
Gainesville, FL 32601
Box office: 352.375.4477
Eight performances a week through March 13
For further info, visit the Hipp website.
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