A Birthday Tangle

A Birthday Tangle unfurls like a cracked music-box in a nursery of chaos: a child’s innocent wish for cake becomes a Rube-Goldberg avalanche of pratfalls, mistaken identities, and collapsing scaffolding. Connie Henley’s wide-eyed gamine skips through a tenement warren where every corridor exhales plaster dust and the scent of burnt candles. Bud Jamison’s brick-wall silhouette looms as a bumbling constable whose baton ricochets off every surface, while Charles Dorety’s wiry contortionist slithers through keyholes and window frames, a human question-mark searching for a sentence. The titular “birthday” is less celebration than ticking fuse: a ribbon-snarl of domestic misunderstandings that detonate across stairwells, rooftops, and a pawnshop stuffed with live geese. By the time the final candle gutters, the cake itself has been weaponized—flung like a sugary meteor into the face of propriety—leaving the audience wheezing in the sooty afterglow of slapstick nirvana.