‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor’ comes to life on the LBHS stage

Local fans of American playwright Neil Simon were treated to a trip down memory lane as the Long Beach High School Drama Department revived one of his old classics, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, directed by Vanessa Krywe and designed by Eric Krywe.

Written in 1993, the show depicts a team of comedy writers in television's Golden Age who recreate the mayhem, neuroses, and nonstop gags of a team of brilliantly funny social misfits for a weekly variety program called The Max Prince Show.

As the plot evolves, the characters unravel as Max's penchant for tipping the bottle and popping pills is growing under the pressures of a rising McCarthyism, network executives, and sponsors who want him to dumb down his show.

Theater historians will remember that Simon based this play on Cid Caesar's Your Show of Shows and The Jackie Gleason Show.

Greg Sedlik starred as Max Prince, the paranoid comic genius who is a tyrant with a heart of gold and Joseph Keiserman played his Russian head writer Val.

Gavin Enright, Danny Malone, Adam Goldberg, Alexandra Pellett and Alex Solomon created their own unique personas as Max's staff of neurotic, insult flinging, hypochondriacal writers, and Eileen Kelly rounded out the cast as Helen.