Film historian, lecturer and preservationist Eric Grayson will screen “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” a 1935 film starring W.C. Fields and Kathleen Howard, at the Garfield Park Arts Center, 2432 Conservatory Drive, at 7 p.m. Saturday.
   
Fields plays Ambrose Woolfinger, whose rotten day starts when two burglars get drunk on his homemade applejack in his basement. He is forced to handle the situation and winds up being arrested for distilling liquor without a license. 

This is to the delight of his wife (Howard) and ungrateful brother-in-law (Grady Sutton). Woolfinger loses his job, gets multiple parking tickets, and things keep getting worse.  
Admission is $5; concessions are $1. Info 327-7135. Visit www.drfilm.net/blog for more information on Grayson’s work.

Mayhem and zany comedy will be unleashed when Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre presents the Tony Award-winning musical “The Drowsy Chaperone” for the first time starting April 9.

The past enters the present in this high-energy celebration of the Jazz Age, taking audiences back to a time of Prohibition, flappers and gangsters. A lover of musical theatre, a character known only as the Man in the Chair, plays a recording of his favorite show: the fictitious 1928 musical “The Drowsy Chaperone.” But as he listens, the recording comes to life in his apartment and the fun begins. 

Show-stopping songs and rip-roaring dance numbers feature two lovers on the eve of their wedding, a bumbling best man, a desperate theatre producer, a not-so-bright hostess, two gangsters posing as pastry chefs, a misguided Don Juan and an intoxicated chaperone.

Called “the perfect Broadway musical” by New York Magazine, “The Drowsy Chaperone” opened on Broadway in 2006 and played for nearly 700 performances. 

Starring as the Man in the Chair is David Schmittou, who has been seen at Beef & Boards as Max in “Lend Me A Tenor” and Georg von Trapp in The Sound of Music and Mortimer Brewster in Arsenic & Old Lace. Returning to the Beef & Boards stage are Timothy Ford, Suzanne Stark, John Vessels and Deb Wims.

Tickets range from $40 to $65 and include a buffet dinner. Discounts are available for children ages 3-15 and groups of 20 or more. A show schedule is posted at www.beefandboards.com, and tickets are available by calling 872-9664.