The Encore Musical Theatre Company is taking a break from musicals to offer up a double dose of farce.

Slamming doors, fractured romances, comical confrontations, and lots of sardines happen on stage and off in Michael Frayn’s witty send-up of the theatrical life Noises Off! and the Encore company deliver a laugh-filled romp.

A very British theater group is traveling the countryside with a country house farce called Nothing On. Frayn’s play begins with a dress rehearsal that suggests the troupe is not quite ready for prime time and then takes us to two performances that devolve into chaos, one from the backstage view and the other from the stage view. It’s an affectionate but also biting view of theater types -- just the sort of thing theater types love to do.

Director Tobin Hissong keeps the verbal and physical action moving at breakneck speed. This is a play with a lot of witty dialogue and slapstick and mime. Hissong has a fine cast and he gets exactly the right comic effect from the various stereotypes Frayn uses for the play within the play and his portrayal of actors.

Daniel A. Helmer is the suave, sardonic Lloyd Dallas, the poor man assigned to direct Nothing On, a naughty sex farce. Helmer affects a just right Cary Grant snap in his English accent and a slightly florid set of gestures. At the beginning of the play, he’s a disembodied voice patiently and then less patiently taking his cast through their paces. Helmer has a winning charm that makes his character’s complicated romantic life believable and funny.

Each of the actors is a type and each is always cast to play that type.

Derek Ridge is the stiff, masculine leading man Garry Lejeune, who plays Roger Tramplemain, the real estate man hoping to “have a go” with a sexy young blonde named Vicki. On stage Lejeune is a man in charge. But without a script, he has a hard time finishing a sentence or framing an idea. Ridge does a great English accent and has a hilarious range of facial expressions that convey shock, outrage, and pure bewilderment.

The object of Roger’s pursuit is Vicki, played in Nothing On by spacey Brooke Ashton. She’s an actress who throws herself body and soul into her performance of Vicki. Tara Tomcsik-Husak is, as the British would say “brilliant", as Brooke and Vicki. Her body is all awkward angles and extravagant gestures. Her voice is a couple octaves higher than it should be. If Vicki is dim and frantic, Brooke is bored and spaced out. Tomcsik-Husak is very funny with her facial expressions, especially when she loses track of her contact lenses.

The hopeful lovers are using a country house for their liaison thinking that no one is there. How wrong they are.

The housemaid -- you know the one -- is loud, lazy, forgetful, with a lower class accent. Mrs. Clackett is a regular in British farce and a chance for aging actress Dotty Otley to return to the footlights. She’s even helping finance the production. Wendy Katz Hiller is a hoot as Dotty, a well-named woman who has a hard time remembering her lines, her actions, or much of anything else. She’s having a thing with the young Garry Lejeune, but she can always change her mind.

The plot thickens. The tax-dodging owners Philip and Flavia Brent sneak back to their house from Spain. Doors open and close, sardines appear and disappear, Vicki’s getting goosebumps dressed only in her underwear.

Method actor Frederick Fellowes is the sort of ham who needs a proper motivation for every move he makes on stage. Rusty Mewha affects a sweeping Leslie Howard persona. He’s funny being sweet and innocent as those around him suspect he’s up to no good. Mewha is particularly good at looking baffled.

Julie Garlotte is the acting company’s anchor, the level-headed, confiding adult in a group of overage children. Garlotte is Belinda Blair who plays the trusting wife Flavia and who rallies the troupe when things are down. Garlotte has her comic moments late in the play, but her importance is in providing a sensible center.

The last Nothing On cast member is the old veteran. Selsdon Mowbray has traversed the British countryside for years and years. He sometimes forgets rehearsals and performances because he “drinks a bit.” Dale Dobson plays the forgetful, frustrating, and yet lovable Selsdon with all those adjectives in place.

All good theatrical productions depend of good stage managers. The very talented Keith Kalinowski plays Tim Allgood, the person who can repair a set, run errands, keep the shows running on time, keep the actors fresh long after the director has gone, and fill in when Selsdon fails to show. Kalinowski plays Allgood with stoic forbearance even as things fall apart around him and his shift from excited to placid is a wonder.

Tim’s assistant is the much overworked and frequently frazzled Poppy Norton-Taylor played with just the right amount of weary pluck by Chris Purchis. She sees it through without complaint until she’s taken for granted one too many times.

Jennifer Maiseloff ‘s fine set in the small Encore space is excellent in a comically cramped way. Acts one and three are the country house living room and upstairs hall and bedroom doors. Act two is the back of this set with props ready and cast members making costume changes and frantically communicating in mime. The set works beautifully. As an added bonus, the audience can watch the company move the set around and rearrange it from front to back and back to front.

Even the program is entertaining with a funny mock program of Nothing On inside the real program. Who knew sardines were that important?

Though this is a fine production throughout, Acts One and Three draw more laughs than the backstage Act Two, which relies on slapstick and mime for its humor. Much of this is funny but it sometimes gets a little muddled as to what is going on and why. But the actors are all in for the fire drill pace and when things spill over to the stage it’s a riot.

The play spins deliriously out of control and into a sublime silliness at the end, as Frayn intended. As Hissong writes in his program note, “The truth of the matter is we all need a good laugh every now and then.”

Well, here it is!

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit.

Noises Off! continues Thursdays to Sundays through Feb. 19. For tickets, call The Encore Theatre Box Office at 734-268-6200 or visit the website