Grab your turbo-strength girdle! Put your teeth in! And pull-up those big-girl panties! Because all hell’s about to break loose at the Magnolia Place Senior Living Home! But before we let the broads loose on the audience for approximately two and a half hour’s stage traffic, we should take down the particulars! Laurel Mill Playhouse is the where! This upcoming weekend (September 19th, 20th, and 21st 2025) is the when! (Also 8:00pm on Friday & Saturday night, 2:00pm on Sunday afternoon) Four Old Broads directed by Lorraine Brooks is the what! It’s a hoot! It’s a scream! It’s a ridiculous comedy about— as the title indicates— four old broads trying to unearth a chaos-mystery as some shady things have started to go down at their senior home!
The stage of Laurel Mill Playhouse is transformed by Set Designer Lorraine Brooks and Set Painter David Wilkins (and check out all the awesome paintings all over the walls— it’s all done/provided by the cast! A lot of the pictures look fun and whimsical like things done at ‘paint-n-sip’ style outings!) You get the sense that you’re really in the common room of a lively senior home. It’s homey without being too cozy and just enough of a ‘group setting’ vibe to it without feeling like an institutionalized setting. More Golden Girls verve, less Cuckoo’s Nest, though the play itself feels like its threading elements of both together into its narrative! Costume Designer Marge McGugan (supplemented by the cast) has really come up with some looks that completely fit the plot and the character type. The dresses that the Maude character gets to prance around in, once they enter her in the Miss Magnolia Senior Pageant, are wild and vivacious like her zany personality. And Elvis’ jumpsuit is perfect for The King. (Double-shout-out to professional Elvis Coach Jed Duvall for guiding the pelvic-pops, vocal inflection, and overall motion of the actor playing Sam, whose character is meant to be a retired Elvis impersonator!)
Lighting Designer Patrick Pase and Sound Designer Lorraine Brooks (we’re sensing the theme here that Brooks wears many hats in this production) have some really cool features for this production. Pase and Brooks have rigged up this drop-light & choir-of-angels cue to plays when the Eaddy character jumps up into prayer. (If you fast-forward Steel Magnolias about 60 years into the future, Eaddy is Annelle, praying at the drop of a hat!) But it only gets used the first two times and the very final time she goes to pray. The cue is so funny, winning a bunch of laughter from the audience, one wishes it was used every time the character does (it would have strengthened the callback of the joke and really had the audience in stitches by the final jump-up-and-pray, as the audience was starting to expect it.) Pase makes a bold choice during the ‘heist-recovery’ scene as well to go full-dark on the stage except for running head-lamps around the actors’ necks…which to be honest, I didn’t love at first, but as the scene progressed it grew on me and became part of the humor of that particular moment. And Brooks’ use of that overly dramatic-soapy-sappy music (combined with Pase’s blue-light to indicate the television) for ‘Maude’s stories’ is divine!
The show had some pacing issues. The scene change between scenes one and two did have music to cover it but the music concluded before the actors had returned to start the second scene and there were some moments, particularly with the Beatrice character, where lines were being stumbled over or forgotten and it bogged down the natural tempo of what should be rapid-fire comedy. (On the whole, because of the nature of the play, it didn’t seem too out of place for an older lady in a senior home to be fumbling for words or looking blankly around from time to time for the lines, but it became noticeable in the pacing. It should also be noted that the opening weekend of the performance was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances in the cast and this could have contributed to some of the off-kilter pacing.)
The performances were strong, despite some of the line-slips and pacing issues. And Marge McGugan, as Beatrice really did zap some of her one-liners with that edgy zing that smacks with hilarity, landing the audience in stitches. And when she bolts up and steals/finishes one of Eaddy’s prayer, hollering her head off about putting on their big girl panties because it’s about to go down, it’s a hilarious show-stopping moment. The feisty camaraderie between McGugan’s Beatrice and Maureen Rogers’ Eaddy Mae Clayton is a driving force in the performance. Rogers, who is hopping up to pray every five seconds like she’s at mid-morning Catholic mass, wears the character well, especially when she’s launching into her delusional desire to be Farrah Fawcett from Charlies Angels. That batty enthusiasm, especially when she cries “this really is Charlies Angels! I really am Farah!” is so darling and charming you can’t help but giggle.
Ann Henry, as the obstreperous Nurse Pat Jones— outlier of the otherwise becalmed existence inside Magnolia Place— has her moments. A little sluggish on the quips but gosh-darn if she isn’t hilarious with her eyerolls and mangling poor Ruby Sue’s name. (It’s a scripted running gag that every time she addresses that character she gets the name wrong and between Henry’s biting tone and the way the actress playing Ruby Sue responses, it’s hilarious.) Playing the delightful surprising Ruby Sue, Leena Dev really lends a youthful exuberance to the cast and her flip-spin of accents late in the performance is simply smashing. Watching her stink-eye/side-eye combo aimed at Henry’s Nurse Pat every time the character gets her name wrong is a tickling comedic gem.
If you’re going to fall in love with one of the titular characters, it’s Imogene Fletcher (Anne Hull.) She’s charming, she’s sharp as a tack, and when she explodes to break up the bitchy-bicker-fest between Eaddy and Beatrice, it’s downright uproarious. Hull’s capability to vacillate between wholly cogent and articulate to a gibbering, out-of-sorts individual is spectacular. And her adorable meet-cute flirtations with Sam (Sanjeev Dev) are so sweet and silly; it’s delightfully endearing. One of the best things about Hull’s performance is when she goes off into one of her ‘spells’ mouthing and gesturing silently as if the scene has cut-away from her but she’s still stuck in that ‘spell.’ It’s epic.
Ladies and gentleman, Elvis— I mean, uh, Sam (Sanjeev Dev) has entered the building! He’s a hunka-hunka-hilarious is what! While Dev is far too young to be a retired anything, we’re going with the fact that he’s got the soul of an Elvis impersonator and for as wild and animated as he is in this portrayal of Sam, audiences everywhere will forgive the fact that he’s too young to be playing the part! Dev is zany and downright hysterical when he’s putting the moves on Imogene. Everything from his comic timing to his pelvic-pops (purposefully coached to look a little geriatric!) is marvelous. And extra praises are owed to Dev because there were two or three notable times where his clever improvisational skills pulled a scene back around to where it was meant to be. (In community theatre— the prime word being ‘community’ you build a network of trust with your fellow co-stars so that if you drop a line, lose your place, etc. you know they’ve got you— and Sanjeev Dev is like the community leader here, helping his fellow co-stars out with line-feeding, recovery, and scene-movement! He’s a twinkling gem!)
Show-stopping antic-queen Maude (Stacey Saunders) is out of this world when it comes to the over-the-top caricature we’re getting. Saunders is really playing three characters bundled up into one Maude. There’s death-obsessed, funeral-planning, Maude. There’s va-va-voom, newly-rediscovered Maude. And there’s clumsy-as-heck, blind-as-a-bat hilarious Maude. And Saunders is giving us those three in spades! Her physicality is hysterical, her vocal inflections, especially when she’s fussing about her stories, are wild, and her overall command of stage presence is unhinged. She is by far an audience (and my personal) favorite and she’s in a knock-down-drag-out competition for scene-stealing-show-stopper with Sanjeev Dev over who has the audience in stitches the most. (Honestly they probably tie.) She’s a hoot and her costumes are as unhinged as her over-the-top personalities.
You only live once. Make it a thrilling life, because as Beatrice said, “I tried being normal. Once. It was the most boring 15 minutes of my life!” You’ll want a little vim, vigor, chaos, calamity, and fun in your life and Laurel Mill Playhouse has that with Four Old Broads playing through September 21st in the heart of the downtown historic main street.
Running Time: Approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes with one intermission
Four Old Broads plays through September 21st 2025 at Laurel Mill Playhouse— in the heart of historic Laurel at 508 Main Street in Laurel, MD. Tickets should be purchased in advance (though walk-ins are welcome!) and are available by calling the box office at 301-617-9906 or through the ticketing website online.
To view the show’s full program, click here.