Fuddy Meers to Close Early in the West End
by Broadway Staff • Jun 7, 2004
The critically lambasted West End mounting of David Lindsay-Abaire's Fuddy Meers, headlined by Tony winner Katie Finneran and film star Matthew Lillard, will end its run at the Arts Theatre on June 12 after exactly one month of performances. The show had been booking through August.
Fuddy Meers centers on Claire Finneran, a woman who suffers from a strange form of amnesia, causing her to wake up every morning with no memory. She is eager to unearth who she really is and one day this desire causes her to have the most jam-packed day of discovery imaginable, meeting a series of bizarre characters along the way. A husband she does not know, a lisping, limping disfigured man who claims to be her brother, her stroke-impaired mother, a cop who may or may not be a cop and a convict on the run who can only express himself through a foul-mouthed sock puppet.
Fuddy Meers centers on Claire Finneran, a woman who suffers from a strange form of amnesia, causing her to wake up every morning with no memory. She is eager to unearth who she really is and one day this desire causes her to have the most jam-packed day of discovery imaginable, meeting a series of bizarre characters along the way. A husband she does not know, a lisping, limping disfigured man who claims to be her brother, her stroke-impaired mother, a cop who may or may not be a cop and a convict on the run who can only express himself through a foul-mouthed sock puppet.
The show is the first theatrical production to be presented by Scamp Film and Theatre Ltd., the new Covent Garden based production company set up by Sam Mendes with co-directors Pippa Harris and Caro Newling. Directed by Angus Jackson, Fuddy Meers, a success off-Broadway, opened at the Arts to mostly negative reviews on May 25. In his review of the production, Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard wrote: "The only virtue of David Lindsay-Abaire's aggressively boring farce about a victim of amnesia is its almost instant forgettability. The play vanishes in a puff of triviality."
In addition to Finneran and Lillard, Nicholas Le Prevost, Charlotte Randle and Julia McKenzie star.