On Monday Week 10, URY will be transporting us back to the 1940s with their new film noir sitcom, Trimble, written by Ed Greenwood and produced by John Wakefield. It will be recorded in front of a live audience at 5:30pm in V/045, with free admission.
“Trimble is an embittered ex-cop,” explains Wakefield. “He’s been thrown out for unspecified reasons and he’s ended up finding pets for a living. That’s his private job as a detective.” The show revolves around the titular character, played by Lewis Chandler, as he tries to get back into the police force. Along the way, we meet his old drunken chief of police, a bevy of naïve rookies, and a long-suffering secretary, Suzy. There is, of course, a selection of classic clichéd villains, but Wakefield refuses to comment on them, adding, “we’ll let the audience discover what’s going to happen!”
The show promises to be a thorough spoof of film noir, complete with an appropriately dressed cast and a live jazz band (York’s own Dandy and DeLions, playing under the more jazzy moniker The DeLions Septet). The band will be providing the entire soundtrack and they’ll also be part of the actual story. Again, the producer refuses to expand on that, simply revealing with a surreptitious grin, “They have a lot of jokes, but I’ll leave the audience find out what those jokes are. It’ll be a fabulous music night as well as a fabulous comedy night!”
For Wakefield, a third year student, this is his last big production at university. Although he has participated in a substantial number of plays throughout the past few years, this is the first of its kind. “We’ve done a couple of sketch shows in front of a live audience, but nothing on this scale with live music.” This naturally means there is a risk that things could go wrong, or as Wakefield sees it, “There’s always an edge of your seat excitement that we might muck up.” In fact, that fear seems to be a driving force in this show. “We need people to laugh, otherwise it won’t work… but probably if it goes wrong it might be even funnier. We’re recording this for a show and the one thing everyone wants to listen back to when they’ve been to a live recording is the bit that went wrong.”
Trimble is a three-part sitcom that evolved out of a play Greenwood wrote for DramaSoc’s Play in a Day, an event where participants write full scripts from beginning to end in, you guessed it, a day. Wakefield describes the original script as “hysterically funny,” explaining that Monday’s production is URY’s attempt at taking that idea and expanding it into “something fantastic.” We’ll just have to wait a few days to see how the 1940s play out on campus. Until then, we’ll just have to make do with the trailer.