Rags-To-Riches Comedy from Across the Pond Makes Its Way To Northwest Arkansas Audiences. The Play That Goes Wrong will have you in stitches in your seat at Walton Arts Center.

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If ever there were truth in advertising, it’s the hit British comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, says producer Kevin McCollum. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s been a pleasure having a show that I can market, and it is exactly what it says it is!” McCollum (Rent, Avenue Q) has teamed up with famed writer/producer J.J. Abrams (Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost) to present this international sensation about a hilariously disastrous production of a murder mystery here in the United States. Abrams saw the show in London, when he took a Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “I was amazed by the whole construction of it,” he says. “The way it was put together. The rhythm of it. The cleverness. The brilliance of the performers.”

The show is the brainchild of three graduates of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art — Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis. Sayer says the three men, who performed improv comedy, “were all living together in West London in a little flat in Gunnersbury. “We were working different day jobs,” Sayer says. “I was working at a telephone call center, Henry was working at a burger joint, the other Henry was working in a pub. And we would come home in the evenings, and we’d start writing together.”

Fans of British comedy, from silent film to Mr. Bean, Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, they drew upon their own theater disaster stories to craft a script filled with outrageous slapstick calamities, Sayer says. “There’s always a little bit of some kind of experience we’ve had, that informs some of the moments,” he explains. “But, obviously we take it to a much, much more excruciating place.”

An hour-long version of The Play That Goes Wrong opened in 2012 at the Old Red Lion Pub in North London, with sets, costumes and props the company members (Mischief Theatre) designed themselves. “When we started, there was an audience of about four people,” Shields says. But word of mouth helped grow the audiences and propel the show to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where the show acquired producers to take it on tour in the U.K. The producers said, “Well look, you’ve got half of the show,” Sayer remembers. “Now you need to have a second act.”

So, as the three writer/actors worked on a second act, they teamed up with set designer Nigel Hook to come up with more catastrophic theatrical misfortunes. “We wrote down a list of big visual effects that we’d love to have,” Sayer says. And, Shields adds, “We got pretty much everything that we asked for.” Hook’s two-level set, which won a 2017 Tony Award for scenic design, provides a cascading series of malfunctions, beginning with simple effects like doors sticking and pictures falling off the wall, to some truly spectacular and sidesplitting disasters. U.S. producer Kevin McCollum calls it a “set with personality,” which is “the antagonist” to the 10 actors in the show. “It’s man against the elements,” he says, “and it’s very, very powerful stuff.”

Shields says another key to the expansion of the show was to discover how they could “find one joke and then find 10 other jokes that come out of it.” He points to the large grandfather clock on the set, “Just that one prop is used over and over again. The hands come off the clock face; people walk into it; people get stuck inside it; we play a scene to the clock.” The results are “that I think there are more than a thousand jokes in the show, if you include every little laugh,” he says. “Because we get a laugh at least every six or seven seconds, I believe.”

After the U.K. tour, the new and improved play returned to London to the Duchess Theatre on the West End in 2014, where it captured the Olivier award for Best New Comedy. It’s still running. The Play That Goes Wrong is now the longest-running play on Broadway and has been produced in cities across the globe. “One of the most amazing things about having the show running all over the world is to be able to go and see different people in completely different cultures in completely different countries really laughing and enjoying the show,” Lewis says. “To see people in Norway laughing the same way that they’re laughing in Mexico or in Moscow, or all these different places, is really, really great.”

“It’s too easy to find reasons to be depressed and terrified and unsure and disheartened in this moment.” Abrams adds. “And finding something that is pure, unadulterated, hysterically funny, and bighearted piece of entertainment is no small thing. I think one of the reasons that people are laughing as hard as they are at this show is not just that it is so funny, but also that people are so desperate to have a good time. It’s not just about being distracted by the world; it’s about remembering that one of the great reasons we are alive is to come together and to laugh. And The Play That Goes Wrong does that.”

The Play That Goes Wrong

DATES: Nov. 12-17

Welcome to opening night of The Murder at Haversham Manor where things are quickly going from bad to utterly disastrous.