NEW YORK—For its final main stage production after a 25-year run, The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) offers up the comedy “Three Wise Guys,” a nostalgic work with more than a little heart. Written by Scott Alan Evans and Jeffrey Couchman, and based on two stories by Damon Runyon, the piece includes criminals, chorus girls, high society matrons, and butlers, and for a lucky few, the chance to turn their lives around.
It’s Christmas Eve, 1932, but those at a New York speakeasy run by Good Time Charlie (Ron McClary) are not in a festive mood: The Dutchman (Joel Jones) is $2,000 in debt thanks to a horse race gone bad and has taken a job as a Santa Claus; Blondy Swanson (Karl Kenzler) still pines for Clarabelle Cobb (Victoria Mack), who left him six years before when he refused to renounce the bootlegging trade; and Dancing Dan (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), a happy-go-lucky sort, is on the hit list of racketeer and bootlegger Heine Schmitz (John Plumpis) for going out with the chorus girl Muriel O' Neill (Mack). Heine also has eyes for her.
