Curtain closer: VPA brings season 41 to an end with ‘California Suite’

WASILLA — Valley Performing Arts closes out its season with a lesser known comedy from legendary playwright Neil Simon.

California Suite, which opens tonight and runs with three shows each weekend through May 28, tells its story in four vignettes, all set in and around the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Each of the stories focuses around a set of visitors — one pair from New York, another from Philadelphia, a pair of Academy Award attendees from London and a pair of couples from Chicago, who’ve simply been vacationing with one another for too long.

Directing all this madness is Valley Performing Arts regular actor and director Matthew Firmin. Simon wrote the play in 1976 and the setting calls for the mid-1970s, but Firmin decided to advance the setting to the present.

“Neil Simon was living in L.A. at the time he wrote it and I believe staying at the suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel. At the time, he had just gotten divorced, I think,” Firmin said. “It’s basically two hours of making fun of L.A. and the people who go to L.A. It’s pretty entertaining and funny because nobody here lives in L.A.”

The ensemble cast means some actors are playing multiple roles, including Jason Bailey, who plays Marvin Michaels in the Philadelphia story and Mort Hollender in the Chicago one, in which he’s convinced Stu and Gert Franklyn — played by Dana Snow and Tori Hicks — intentionally conspired to injure the ankle of his wife Millie — played by Shellie Riggan — while they were playing tennis.

“(Ensemble cast) is nice for the actor because you do get little breaks in the show; you’re not constantly making quick turnarounds. You can just focus on your part,” Bailey said. “I guess with other roles I’ve been almost cartoonish with my comedy. In this, I’m having to play it a lot more straight. That kind of requires more of me as an actor.”

Bailey said he wasn’t familiar with the play, and didn’t read the script before rehearsing.

“I’ve heard of a few of the more popular Neil Simon shows, but mainly I decided to try out for the show because of the director,” Bailey said. “He’s a really fun guy.”

In his other role in the show, Bailey plays a man in town for his nephew’s bar mitzvah only to wake up next to a prostitute.

“His brother sets him up with a hooker and he wakes up the next morning and she’s there. Nothing’s happened between them but he doesn’t know that because he was so drunk,” Bailey said. “His wife shows up while he’s trying to get the hooker out of the room and all sorts of hilarity ensues.”

The story that probably requires the most updating from the 70s to the present is the London visitors, where Kenai Malay and Courtneylynn Cox play Sidney and Diana Nichols, the latter nominated for an Oscar.

“I’m a husband who doesn’t favor the company of women quite as much as she hopes,” Malay said of Sidney. “A lot of it is bickering. The marriage is not working and after the nomination we delve deeper into the why the marriage isn’t so great.”

Cox has considerable experience in local theater, including roles with VPA in the ‘Trials of Alice in Wonderland’, ‘A Christmas Carol’ at Glenn Massay Theater and several dancing performances.

“It’s a slightly familiar character for me, but you always want to audition as many times as you can and you want to be prepared,” she said. “I researched it and adored the idea of playing Diana.”

The list of real-name actors mentioned in the original version were among the most necessary anachronisms needing correction. To that end, Tatum O’Neal has been changed to Channing Tatum, Liza Minelli to Sandra Bullock and Burt Reynolds to Ryan Reynolds.

Other than that, the script holds up pretty well, they said.

“We have incredible actors,” Cox said. “There’s good resolve in all the scenes and I think it’s a real joy to be part of and I think people are going to get a real kick out of watching it.”

Showtimes are 7 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays with 2 p.m. Sunday matinees.

‘California Suite’ is the last of a seven-show season that started with ‘Harvey’, continued on to ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, ‘Elf: The Musical’, ‘Lend Me A Tenor’, and ‘And Then There Were None’.