At left, Cassandra Marie Murphy, Christie Coran. At right, Kasey Mahaffy. [Photos by Craig Schwartz]
“All of it just sounds like a party, and that really catapults me into driving the next scene,” says Kasey Mahaffy, who stars as Francis.
The musical uplift isn’t incidental.
A Noise Within’s season marketing even bills the show “with songs by Grant Olding.” But the show’s secret ballast is Rachel—a woman passing as her supposedly dead gangster brother, Roscoe—whose masquerade sets the chaos in motion.
“Creating a character in disguise has been a unique (but fun!) challenge,” Christie Coran says. “You have to create two characters: Rachel, and then Roscoe as remembered by Rachel…. She’s willing to go to extremes and risk it all to be with the man she loves.”
Coran’s transformation is tactile.
“The first time I tried on the suit in my costume fitting, I immediately felt it,” she says. “You carry yourself in a different way wearing a suit! You take up more space, you command the room.”
In a play set just as ’60s social currents begin to shift, that charge matters: Rachel’s stint in a man’s body language becomes a light-on-its-feet feminist fable about claiming space—without slowing the laugh rate.
Farce, of course, lives or dies on precision.
“We break it down pretty technically at first…. It’s like music, in a way. It’s very exact,” Coran says.
Co-directors Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott have the company drilling rhythms and then letting loose—the ideal two-step for pratfalls and split-second reveals. Mahaffy talks about the toll and the thrill of that calibration.
“I’m currently struggling with my morning workouts after these rehearsals where I throw my body around that stage for five hours a night,” he admits.
Meditation and stretching replaced some gym time as run-throughs ramped up. And the directors keep him rooted in the character’s stakes: “Where Francis is coming from, how hungry he is, how broke he is, how in love he is with Dolly; all of that information roots the comedy in a more realistic place. It makes it funnier.”
That balance—engineering and spontaneity—shows up in rehearsal-room mishaps that become keepers.
Coran singles out Josey Montana McCoy’s 87-year-old waiter, Alfie, and a gag in which he fights his way upright using the table and a fellow actor’s leg.
“The commitment and physical comedy was just on-point, and it took us all a few tries to get through that scene without bursting out laughing.” Expect that kind of danger-adjacent slapstick to be baked into the final show.
The Brighton of 1963 gives the ensemble a class-conscious playground—and its own band.
“For a while we worked music rehearsals and scene-work rehearsals separately,” Mahaffy says. “Now that we’re in run-throughs, it’s so fun to see how the songs fit in and buoy the scenes along.”
It’s the reason the cast keeps making that “accidental musical” joke, and why this season opener should land with effervescence rather than period dust.
A Noise Within frames this premiere as the ignition point for “Songs from the Volcano,” the company’s 2025–26 season. In Rachel’s case, disguise becomes liberation; in Francis’s, appetite becomes a survival strategy and a punch line. Either way, when the doors start slamming and the washboard scrapes, the room tilts toward forgiveness. As Coran puts it, the music “helps make a happy ending possible for all of us.”
Who’s in it: Mahaffy (Francis) and Coran (Rachel) lead a large company that includes Ty Aldridge, Lynn Robert Berg, Luis Kelly-Duarte, Henri Lubatti, Evan Lugo, Josey Montana McCoy, Trisha Miller, Cassandra Marie Murphy, and Paul David Story. Rodriguez-Elliott and Elliott co-direct; Rod Bagheri is music director.
When You Go
What: One Man, Two Guvnors
Where: A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
When: Aug. 31–Sept. 28, 2025
Running time: ~2 hours 15 minutes, including intermission
Credits note: Based on Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, with songs by Grant Olding.
Tickets and schedule at anoisewithin.org.
