Review of The Cottage on Broadway

I will admit, going to see The Cottage during my New York trip was something completely and utterly unexpected.

I was thinking about seeing it when I saw it on TDF originally, but shrugged it off because I knew nothing about the show. Lo and behold I was asked if I wanted to volunteer usher at the Hayes Theatre in exchange for seeing the show for free on a Friday night, and I knew I couldn’t pass up such an opportunity.

Whenever I’m offered to do work in exchange for free tickets, I always take it. So I adorned my theater blacks and after work that day I trekked to Times Square, took over direction duty for the patrons, and was given an excellent orchestra seat (H 106 is smack dab in the middle and had such a perfect view of the stage).

Now, I didn’t even read a synopsis of what the play was about before I ended up seeing it on Broadway, and when you first enter the theater, there’s a screen in front of the actual elaborate cottage set.

That’s the first sign of what’s to come. There’s a shirtless gardener, various animals having sex, and then the actual cottage depicted on the screen. Behind it is the stage, but when I saw the images depicted on there, I knew I was in for a wild ride. And a wild ride it was, one that was full of so much laughter. This is such a fun mindless summer show.

Let’s get into my review.

An elaborate farce on cheating and sexuality in the 1920s among British society members.

So The Cottage establishes us with this detail: Sylvia is having an affair with her husband’s brother. Every summer for one night they meet and have passionate sex, but this time is completely different.

Sylvia mentions how she wants to leave her husband and get married to the brother, Beau, but then he seems weary about the fact. When she mentions she sent a telegram to her husband’s brother’s wife, who is Beau’s wife, both the brother (Sylvia’s husband) Clarke, and Beau’s wife, Marjorie, show up at the cottage. Something to note is this cottage belongs to the brothers’ mother.

There, it is revealed that Clarke and Majorie have been having an affair with each other, and when she reveals her pregnancy is by Clarke and not Beau, it’s time for them to gear up for a divorce. Sylvia becomes ecstatic because thinks it means that she finally has a chance to go off and marry Beau, but a new variable shows up at the house: his other lover, Deidre, effectively pissing Sylvia off. What happens next is a mixture of comedy, farce, and it all comes with a feminist twist, especially as we get towards the end of the show.

I’m not going to go into detail when it comes to the synopsis of the show, but the biggest driving force throughout are the comedy elements. There are some big gags that as a volunteer usher, we were told to warn the patrons about because they’re trigger warnings.

Smoking is a big part of a running joke throughout the show, and you can smell the false cigarettes if you were in a seat like mine. Sex obviously plays such a big part of the show, from the physical comedy to the verbal jokes that come on throughout the dialogue. There’s also a gunshot about five minutes into the beginning of act two.

But I thought the comedy was actually really done throughout the show. It’s a bit out there and outlandish at time, but it worked in the context in the fact that all of the characters were over the top.

Everyone has a specific role to play and I thought all of the actors did a really decent job of nailing down the archetypes they were coming into the show with. The people around me were dying laughing throughout the show because of how well done the comedy was done.

I will admit, I knew about the show solely from the fact the girl who did the Girl Scout in Beetlejuice, Steingold, was in the show. I knew nothing else about it, but when I flipped through the playbill I also realized I saw Cooper in POTUS almost exactly a year before seeing this show.

I knew these two were excellent actors, but everyone did an incredible job in my humble opinion. The set design also really lends itself into the comedic elements with the random nooks and crannies, and although this is set in the twenties, this is one of the few sets recently that one would see and think it’s extravagant Broadway.

Overall Thoughts

This honestly was one of my favorite shows this trip, and out of the other comedy I saw, which was Shucked, I thought that I liked The Cottage so much before.

Granted, this would boil down all to the fact that some people have their preferences when it comes to the kind of comedy they consume, so I can see how someone with a different sense of humor or might lean conservative might not like this show at all. I think that if you are even remotely interested in it, I would go for it and see if you end up liking it.

The average ticket price isn’t too bad, and I’m really glad I gave this show a chance and saw it. I didn’t even know the two leads were pretty well-known! But I was impressed by everyone involved with the production, and was blessed they got better from COVID before I saw it.

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