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 officer son in Arthur Miller's "The Price," transforms himself into the slinkiest of lotharios, out-vamped just barely by Jenn Stafford as his torchy ex-wife. 

         Hard as it is to imagine anybody stealing the spotlight from these two, it nevertheless happens twice – in French, no less – when Mario Pedro shows up as the flittery hotel maid. 

         All this madcap mastery comes too late to qualify for the Artie Awards, which are being presented Monday night, but it's a good bet that it will be remembered when time comes for next year's nominations. Meanwhile, there are plenty of chances to see why. The snapping and smooching continues through the end of the honeymoon month of June. 

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