Given its origins as a classic French farce by Georges Feydeau, certain things just come with the territory in Charles Morey’s freely adapted “The Ladies Man.”
There’s the perpetual motion of so many elaborately orchestrated and energetically performed entrances and exits. Double entendres, of course, are in no short supply. Notably scandalous or salacious one-liners bear repeating several times over, routinely accompanied by a melodramatic gesture or a flourish of light. Cases of mistaken identities abound.
That characters are often caught in outrageously compromising positions probably goes without saying. At the very least, though, where else but in Theatre in the Square’s “Ladies Man” can we relish the sight of Andrea Frye, a virtual grande dame of Atlanta theater, wearing a lacy bustier and cracking her whip at a scantily clad younger man (himself in a pair of silk stockings and pink garter belts)?
There are plenty of such sight gags in director Susan Reid’s decidedly disarming production, a number of them manifested via Alan Yeong’s colorful costumes: see Andrew Benator as a hideously attired nerd in a loosely fitted hairpiece (pluth a pronounthed lithp), or Robin Bloodworth in full Prussian-dragoon drag (vith a vondervully overdone ahkzent). Some are more fleeting: see Lane Carlock’s sly handling of a napkin (oo-la-la, indeed).
And there are other visible signs of the care Reid has taken with the show. Rather than providing the characters the usual half-dozen doors to frantically dart between and slam, she and set designer Sara Ward Culpepper utilize revolving flats instead – not the biggest deal, perhaps, but enough of a nice touch to lend a bit of freshness to a familiar formula. That goes for one particularly fanciful scene change, too, in which the actors give the stagehands a break.
Led by the irrepressible Chris Kayser, the game cast also includes Enoch King, Veronika Duerr and Katherine N. LeRoy. Kayser is firmly in his zone here, bringing ample panache to his role as an alternately mischievous and flustered Parisian doctor and rumored philanderer. On opening night, his breathless, brilliantly timed summation speech earned a round of applause.
It isn’t always intended as a compliment to liken a director’s work to that of a traffic cop. For Reid’s part in “The Ladies Man,” however, it is. With no less than eight actors running around the stage on occasion, and especially considering the relative confines of the space, it’s a wonder how she manages to avoid any sense of congestion.
All of the zany action is cleverly choreographed and flows at a quick and constant clip, charging out of the gate at a feverish pitch from the moment designer Rob Dillard turns up his lights and rarely subsiding for the next two hours.
What more could you want from a frivolous farce? The added sensation of seeing Andrea Frye as a whip-wielding sex kitten is just the icing on the cake.
Theater review
“The Ladies Man”
Grade: B+
Through Feb. 26. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays; 2:30 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 15). $24-$33. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369. theatreinthesquare.com.
Bottom line: Tres bien.
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