Synopsis

At Turtle Beach Hotel in the sunny Florida Keys, the views are lovely, the management is desperate, and the hotel itself is clinging to its one-star rating with both hands.

Owners Terry and Brian Cody are hoping to sell their shabby little hotel to a potential buyer, but there’s one tiny problem: Turtle Beach looks less like a thriving resort and more like a place where vacation dreams go to pull a hamstring. So they hatch a gloriously terrible plan — create the illusion of a bustling, successful hotel by turning their staff, friends, and whoever else is nearby into “guests.”

Soon, their crafty handyman Hopkins is posing as a pastor, Terry is reinvented as a Miami Beach socialite, and poor Maureen is juggling duties as maid, receptionist, and room service while trying not to let the whole scheme collapse into the complimentary breakfast.

Unfortunately, Turtle Beach already has actual guests: an eccentric retired British officer and “The Barracuda,” an infamous annual visitor with one thing on her vacation itinerary — male conquest. When prospective buyer Sam Lewis arrives with his girlfriend, Brian must keep the con alive, the fake guests convincing, the real guests contained, and the hotel looking profitable for at least five consecutive minutes.

Then Sam’s morally upstanding wife appears unexpectedly, and the lobby of Turtle Beach Hotel becomes a full-service resort of lies, lust, mistaken identities, frantic cover-ups, and fast-paced farce.

Hotbed Hotel is a crowd-pleasing comedy for community theatres, dinner theatres, and companies looking for a lively 4M/5F ensemble cast, one manageable hotel setting, physical comedy, sharp comic timing, colorful character roles, and laugh-out-loud vacation chaos. This sunny, silly, high-energy farce proves that when your hotel is falling apart, the best business plan may be pretending it isn’t.