Lakefront At The Lighthouse Theatre
With Lakefront, now enjoying it’s world premiere at Port Dover’s Lighthouse Festival Theatre, the prolific Norm Foster is proving that oldsters can be just as romantic – and funny – as the younger couples he has been writing about for decades.
“Write what you know” is timeless advice for writers, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as he himself ages Foster is creating more main characters who are in or approaching their “golden years.” His recent Whit’s End had great fun with a widower’s clumsy attempt to introduce his new love interest to his adult children.
Lakefront is even better and the central characters even older.
As the play opens, an older couple, Christina (Melodee Finlay) and Robert (Ralph Small), are being shown into their room at a modest country resort, the Lakefront of the title, by Duane (Derek Ritschel), the goofy son of the resort’s owners who are on holiday.
Christina and Robert are both single; she divorced, he dumped by a faithless wife. They met at a wedding at which the happy couples being united in holy matrimony had been married and divorced several times. Foster seems to be alerting us that relationships can be an iffy proposition.
During a boozy conversation at the reception, they came round to pondering the thorny question of whether folks at their age (she 68 and he 70) could still be attractive to the opposite sex. They decided to find out.
And so here they are at Lakefront resort in February. Now sober, they are bit apprehensive as to whether or not this was such a great idea.
For two hours Foster has a great deal of fun helping them find out.
Robert is especially concerned about … you know … the “man thing.” Christina says she doesn’t really care about sex.
But it isn’t too long before the too-thin walls of their Lakefront cottage are shaking with Christina’s moans and shrieks as Robert demonstrates his prowess at giving her what every women secretly wants – a really great foot massage.
And so it goes as Lakefront meanders around the will-they-won’t-they question, which in true Foster fashion is neatly and quite satisfactorily answered by play’s end.
Their courtship, if that’s what we can call it, is regularly interrupted by visits from Duane, one of Foster’s most inspired and wildly comic creations. Duane develops a definite attraction to Christina that would be kinda icky if it wasn’t so innocently inane.
Director Jeffrey Wetsch has orchestrated all of this admirably and drawn very funny and, yes, touching performances from his two leads. Finlay makes Christina an alluring mixture of hesitancy and self-assurance. The way she needles Robert about what she sees as his silly concerns about “the man thing” is delightful.
For his part, Small brings a quiet decency to his portrayal of Robert as he frets over his kissing technique. Refreshingly, no “intimacy coach” is credited.
Ritschel, whose day job is being artistic director of the Lighthouse Theatre, damn near steals the show as Duane. He’s hysterical.
Set designer Eric Bunnell has provided what struck me as a photographic reproduction of a similar lakefront cabin on Manitoulin Island where I once stayed. It’s perfect. Costume designer Alex Amini, who has been doing such sterling work at the Foster Festival this year, has created wonderfully witty costumes. Where on earth did she find Robert’s silk pajamas?
Lakefront is another winner from the fertile pen of Norm Foster and well worth the schlep to the shores of Lake Erie. If you can’t make it I have no doubt that Lakefront, like most of Foster’s work, will have an extensive afterlife.
Foster is often called “Canada’s Neil Simon.” The salient difference is that Simon’s natural milieu was Broadway. Why, pray tell, hasn’t Foster been taken up by the giants of Canadian theatre?
Lakefront continues at the Lighthouse Festival Theatre in Port Dover through September 7, 2024. It then transfers to Lighthouse’s Roselawn Theatre in Port Colborne, ON, from September 11 to 22, 2024. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Lighthouse Festival Theatre website.
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