Gannon Knight ArtsLeisure

     “Peeved,” a musical about the annoying aspects of daily life, finished its four day stint at the Erie Playhouse on Feb. 21.
     The play, written by Erie natives Charles Corritore and Michael Malthaner, featured a four-person cast of Leah Johnson, Jean Malthaner, Patrick Thiem and Rich Tryzbiak, who acted out life’s odd annoyances while singing about modern amenities as if they are only conveniences.
     The musical started off with the tongue-in-cheek warning to the audience to turn off cell phones; this was paired with gun shots to illustrate what the staff does to people with noisy phones, so either the cast or Playhouse staff means business.
     From the petty part in which a man attempts to open a CD and receives injuries while doing so, to the story of a smart blonde in a world that is quick to stereotype, the musical touches on many levels of everyday frustration.
     The musical includes little vignettes of a man fighting with his wife while trying to dial an airline and fight with a snappy automated menu system to show how some deal with life’s excruciating circumstances. The musical touches on far-reaching situations as leaving the toilet seat up, a man frustrated with spam e-mail, the pains of Ticketmaster and the woes of texting.
     Tthe show is for people 35 and over – people who knew life before the Internet, the acronyms associated with phrases and statements and past permutations ripe with the “good ol’ times.”
     A particularly good scene in Act 2 involves a man seeing a musical about Anne Frank and how he can’t stand cell phone rings affecting his play experience. The scene quickly becomes his soapbox until his own phone rings disrupting the faux pas show’s main star Britney Spears from acting. The scene is all about breaking down the fourth wall and seeing how we perceive situations out of our control.
     Scenes in the show that weren’t very good were intermittent. From the blonde singing about how no one respects her despite all her degrees to the man who gets so much junk e-mail that he thinks he can create a virus to end all junk e-mail, the show has lofty goals that are pulled down by old-age values and acceptance. Sure, the man doesn’t know a thing about computers, but a red spotlight and war sounds heightened the mood of his anger, even if his character probably didn’t know what trolling is.
     The characters were all lifelike but lacked depth because the plot was filled with cliché situations in which the audience just didn’t know how to act/or respond to a character in the scene and back in the day it was always better. This play contains the reactions of the present viewed through the eyes of baby boomers.
     Overall the play was really taking the values of the movie “Old Dogs” and wrapping it around middle-age America.
     The acting was reasonable, the set was very minimalistic and the writing covered what it needed to. But even after the last song sung predominantly by Thiem, whose character muses about having a nice day, the play ends with him accepting a random act of kindness. After two hours of song and dance about life’s shortcomings, the show is less middle-age “Office Space” and more about the everyman.