You can’t help but feel sorry for Sara Hastings.
Getting Sara Married, the first Many Hats production of 2015 playing through March 7 at the Cannery Stage, follows the harrowing tale of big city lawyer Sara Hastings and her insufferable Aunt Martha who will stop at nothing to try and get her married.
Sara soon finds herself in hot water when Aunt Martha has an unconcious Brandon (Vance Potter) brought to her door by the enthusiastic delivery man Noogie Malloy (Martin Pedersen). Martha hopes this will somehow land Sara in a marrige, but Sara is more worried that it will land her in jail.
Pedersen clearly relishes in the character and it is evident as soon as he hits the stage. He brings an authenticity to the ruffian New Yorker, and most certainly takes the cake for the best New York accent in the production. The only issue with Pedersen’s performance is that we don’t get to see very much of him.
Potter fits right in to the role of the wide-eyed optimist Brandon, who spends the first half of the performance trying to remember who he is — which leads to an amusing series of dissapointing career fields he believes he is in.
Aunt Martha (Jeanne Wnuk) plays a bit of a puppet master, arranging for Brandon to be “bonked” on the head and delivered to Sara’s apartment via Noogie Malloy. Martha is the typical New York family aunt and is bedazzled in so much glitter it’s hard not to laugh the second she appears in a scene.
Sara acts as a catalyst for the wacky characters surrounding her, but gets her moment to shine in an all-telling monologue that felt like it was building up since the first act.
All in all, Getting Sara Married is a wacky romp through an unlikely love story that gets off to a slow start, but builds to a funny finish.
Dale Boyd is the arts and entertainment editor at the Western News
