This was a delightful bit of summer fun. My most vivid recollection of this show was of a scene I wasn't in. Michael Tylo and Deb Echols played a young couple who kept arriving home after various events and having little squabbles as they got ready for bed. Helen Markowitz had knocked herself out creating elaborate Georgian costumes with rows of complicated buttons, and laced up corsets and fancy shoes etc. so they would have a lot of business to do. And of course each was outfitted so that they could be donned in a quick change. Michael and Debbie performed all this flawlessly. The changes worked extremely well. They worked too well! Audiences accustomed to quick cuts in the movies didn't even notice that this nice young couple took fully three or four minutes to get out of each outfit and five seconds tops to get into them. Years later at the Play House, we had a similar revelation during the opening scene of Something's Afoot, when the entire cast had twoquick changes each during the opening number. I remember the ovation we gave ourselves during the dress rehearsal, and the "how nice" reception we got opening night. Television and naturalism have killed off our appreciation of theatricality!

REVIEWS:

DETROIT FREE PRESS: Chekhov, Simon and Slapstick at The Hilberry by Chuck Thurston

Take a large portion of Anton Chekhov short stories, spice to taste with Neil Simon and give it a slapstick garnish by the Hilberry Theatre cast and you have "The Good Doctor," as fair and frothy a summer show as you'll likely find.

In this series of nine vignettes, ana pprentice-dentist, back in the days of pliers and knee-in-the-stomach dentistry, pulls the tooth of a highly nervous sexton. A bank official with very painful gout is confronted by an extremely outgoing peasant woman demanding money to tide her over till her ailing husband is able to work again.

Michael Rothhaar plays the burley sexton who is dragged out of an antique dentist chair and halfway across the stage by Wayne S. Turney, who looks to be half his size, as the dentist-to-be.

This is just one of several roles Turney fills as he and the other four cast members change roles and costumes, manners and attitudes in the sketches.

Mary Gutzi, who plays the shrieking peasant woman, sings a touching duet with Turney in another skit about a couple who meet "Too Late for Happiness" in one of the show's non-comedy moments. Miss Gutzi demonstrates a fine singing voice in this one.

Turney plays Chekhov as sort of an "Our Town" commentator introducing and tying the pieces together, and shows the Russian writer to be a man of wit and charm.

Deborah Eckols, a Hilberry mainstay this past season, demonstrates her versatility as a young, determined girl who walks from Odessa to Moscow to get onstage and after charming and bullying her way to a reading, does all three of Chekhov's "Three Sisters." Miss Eckols does a superb job making the quick shift from the determined kid to the tragic sisters.

Michael Tylo plays several bumblers throughout the evening. One sneezes repeatedly on the back of his superior's head at the opera. Another is taken by his doting father to a bordello and chickens out while father and girl dicker over fee. As an all-around fun show with flashes of excellent acting, "The Good Doctor" deserves to be more than just a two-week summer filler.

DETROIT NEWS Hilberry finely stages 2 humane comedies by Jay Carr

Wayne State University's Hilberry Theatre is doing a salutary job of staging two vastly enjoyable comedies. Edward Albee's "Seascape" and Neil Simon's "The Good Doctor." Neither really made it on Broadway the season before last.

They failed for the best of reasons. Humane rather than sentimental or blatant, both were simply too civilized to inspire the showers of idiot hyperbole that insure Broadway runs.

In Albee's compassionate and witty "Seascape" a middle-aged couuple, representatives of our tired civilization, exchange a series of beautifully written speculations and then help a sensitive couple of mutating lizards up the evolutionary ladder.

"The Good Doctor" is the work that should have earned Simon credit for being more than a slick gag-writing machine. It is his tribute to Chekhov, and we are quickly convinced of the depth and genuineness of his admiration for the great Russian writer. Simon (whose nickname, in case anybody is interested, happens to be "Doc") includes a tender adaptation of an autobiographical short story of Chekhov's.

In it, Chekhov affectionately writes of his father taking him down to a bordello to introduce him to sex as a 19th birthday present, but changing his mind and taking his son home because he'd like to keep him a boy for another year. Like Chekhov's, Simon's characters are small scaled and keenly observed, with a rueful compassion for their failings.

Simon isn't the artist Chekhov is. He must use gag lines where the humor in Chekhov arises from the tension between the vanity of the characters and the impossible situations that vanity creates. But in "The Good Doctor," Simon's gag lines are turned with skill and affection.

It is true that Simon permits himself a few lapses. In his adaptation of "The Sneeze," in which a civil servant who accidentally sneezes on his boss at the theater literally worries himself to death over it, he nods long enough to say 'Cherdyakov's once promising career had literally been blown away." But it is easy to forgive when the episode can contain the following gem, muttered by the brooding Cheryakov, "I was humiliated in such a subtle fashion it was almost indiscernible."

This is probably the place to add that "The Good Doctor" is almost entirely a series of adaptations of Chekhov short stories. The only excerpt from a play is heard in "The Audition," in which a young actress, Deborah Eckols, stops the kidding ("I had to wait three months to get on the six-month waiting list") long enought to movingly recite the closing scene from "The Three Sisters."

Miss Eckols's colleague, Mary Gutzi, had her best moment in the number known as "Defenseless Creature," in which a harridan intimidates a bank manager into coughing up some money to get her to climb down from his desk and stop cursing him. Wayne S. Turney heads the male trio, playing Chekhov, who stitches the episodes together and provides extra comedy. The qualities that Mr. Turney brings to his work worked best, I thought, when he played a vain popinjay of a seducer, filled with self-congratulation ("The staggering figures speak for themselves").

But his portrayals, while technically accomplished, are beginning to border on the brittle and precious. He seems to be falling back on deliveries and mannerisms that worked for him in previous Hilberry ventures [ed. note: Duh-with two weeks rehearsal...I shouldn't remark that Mr. Carr doesn't bother inventing a new writing style for each of his critiques...but I just did...] instead of searching out new ones. Michael Rothhaar was an unfailingly solid asset, usually in the roles of the blustering, put-upon characters. I liked him most as a cheerful beggar who earned his living by pretending to drown ("I;m in the maritime entertainment business.")

Although "The Good Doctor" contains its share of tender and even wistful moments, it isn't all autumnal and ironic. Several episodes border on rough-and-tumble vaudeville.

The cast is completed by Michael Tylo, playing a string of bumbling types, and while it can't be said that the performers always find the style, they all find the right moods and emotions under Richard Spear's fine direction. HE, too, knows his Chekhov, and it's gratifying to think that if you missed either "Seascape" or "The Good Doctor" on Broadway, you can find worthy stagings of both here through Aug 14.