June 8, 2024: Noel Coward's "Private Lives" at the ICTC
For "Private Lives," which opened Friday night at the Irish Classical Theatre Company, fight director Steve Vaughan and intimacy director Jessica Hillman-McCord should have been elevated to the top of the credit page. In cahoots with director Chris Kelly, they're responsible for inflating the already risqué 93-year-old Noël Coward comedy into a riot of romantic mayhem that leaves the stage littered with debris in between smooches steamy enough to serve as illustrations for a sex manual. Right from the start, it's a design for domestic disaster – an upper-crust divorced couple from England honeymooning with their new spouses at the same hotel on the French Riviera. Can the divorcées resist being drawn back into what attracted and repelled each other in the first place? No, they can't. Ben Michael Moran, seen just a few weeks ago at the ICTC as the strait-laced police of...