California Suite

California Suite is composed of four playlets. During the course of the evening, the audience comes to meet four very different sets of visitors, who, at four very different times of the year, occupy the same suite in the Beverley Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Each playlet glitters with a different facet of SimonÂ’s comic magic: sometimes funny, sometimes bittersweet, but always absolutely true-to-life. Visitor from New York concerns a divorced couple trying to do right by their teen-age daughter. It's a heartfelt, insightful and scathingly funny piece featuring Kurt A. Lerps and Debra Chalmers. Visitor from Philadelphia is a freewheeling farce about a man who intends to attend a bar mitzvah but wakes up with an unconscious hooker in his bed Â… and a wife already in the elevator on the way up to the room! Brian Hinselwood and Julie Withers embody this crazy duo. Visitors from London focuses on an enigmatic British couple whose relationship is severely tested on Academy Award night. The couple are elegantly and mercurially portrayed by Jason Ingram Roth and Dale Murison. The evening ends with Visitors from Chicago, a madcap tour de force of physical comedy and timing that illuminates the conflicts and pressures that ensue when two affluent couples go off on an extended vacation together. The foursome is composed of Garry Sommerville and Ann Ricketts, and Wayne Lyngkuist and Katherine Kiorgaard. For this Front Row Theatre production, the director has divided the stage diagonally by means of an imaginary wall, thus showing parts of both the living room and the bedroom at the same time. California Suite had its world première on 10 June 1976 at BroadwayÂ’s Eugene OÂ’Neill Theatre. For this Front Row Theatre production, the director has divided the stage diagonally by means of an imaginary wall, thus showing parts of both the living room and the bedroom at the same time. California Suite had its world première on 10 June 1976 at BroadwayÂ’s Eugene OÂ’Neill Theatre. It starred the Broadway stars of the ‘70s George Grizzard and Tammy Grimes (New York), Jack Weston and Leslie Easterbrook (Philadelphia), George Grizzard and Tammy Grimes (London), and Barbara Barrie, Jack Weston, George Grizzard and Tammy Grimes (Chicago). The play was then made into a hit 1978 film starring Alan Alda and Jane Fonda (New York), Walter Matthau and Elaine May (Philadelphia), Michael Caine and Maggie Smith (London), and Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Gloria Gifford and Sheila Frazier (Chicago). It is ironic that Maggie Smith won an Oscar for her performance as a visitor from London Â… does life always imitate art?