"... a charming play, quick-paced and eventful ..."

Aug. 20, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Julianne Boyd has succeeded gloriously in bringing her talents, and those of several talented members of her theatre family, into their new home at the attractive and functionally re-furbished theatre on Union Street in Pittsfield. The Barrington Stage Company, formerly located in Sheffield, has a lustrous reputation and is a welcome addition to the city's arts scene.

The play chosen for the theatre's gala opening, Anouilh's "Ring Round the Moon," is a period romantic comedy, very reminiscent of Oscar Wilde (the play even opens with a scene between a fashionable young man and his butler, and the plot involves impersonations, deceptions, mistaken identities and even a female cat-fight).

However in Anouilh's play, the period evoked is the mid-twenties of the last century and the characters are a bit more jaded than Oscar's ever were, and totally happy endings a bit harder to come by.

The play is set in the winter-garden of a chateau in the South of France, a magnificent arched conservatory, all glass, greenery and flowers, and projected on the sky beyond the windows, a huge misty moon. As typically needed in farce-comedy, the set has five doors, symmetrically placed, and constantly in use as the involved shenanigans whirl in and out through them. The events center around a grand ball attended by house guests (and a few others).

The intricate plot swirls around a cast of eleven, which with all the comings and goings, seems at times much larger. Central to it all are a pair of identical twin brothers, Frederick and Hugo. No one can tell them apart, not even Diana (Rebecca Watson) who insists she loves Hugo, but is not sure which brother is kissing her.

So alike in looks as to be indistinguishable, the twins are totally different in character and personality. Hugo is cold, caustic, cynical, disillusioned, loving not even himself. Frederick is affectionate, zany, sympathetic and likable. Frederick thinks he is in love with Diana (a fiery red-head, Rebecca Watson) who thinks she loves Hugo.

But Hugo decides to break up the match by bringing in a distraction, a charming little ballet dancer named Isabelle (Ginifer King) to attract Frederick, passing her off as a house guest of his aunt, the formidable dowager Madame Desmermortes,( Carole Shelley) who ruling from a wheel-chair is the king-pin in finally bringing the tangled events to some sense of closure.

Hugo/Frederick is/are played by one actor, the ingenious Christopher Innvar, remembered for his masterful leads in Barrington Stage's productions of "Cyrano" and "Importance of Being Earnest" (in the latter sharing the stage with Carole Shelley as the most original and formidable Lady Bracknell one is ever likely to have seen).

Innvar in his double role in this production delights even further. He in habits each half of it so seamlessly that the audience always knows which brother is on stage, although characters in the plot are not always sure which is the brother with whom they are sparing. A virtuoso performance. And under Boyd's skillful direction, both at times seem on stage at once, so swiftly does Innvar exit one door and enter by another, switching roles with nonchalant ease.

Although the plot swirls through twist after twist as deceptions go awry (and during Act one seems a bit confusing), the varied inhabitants of the chateau, their guests (invited or invading), and their servants, each with his/her own motivations, are sorted out and the wily actors delight with their agendas.

House guest Lady Dorothy India (Christa Scott-Reed) mistress of Dianna's father, Messerschamm (Jordon Charney) a self-made millionaire risen from a Poland Ghetto finds her lover, Messerschamm's secretary Patrice (Mark H. Dold) at the same party. Defying exposure, she and Patrice shine in a brilliantly choreographed scene in which they tango and Charleston furiously and dramatically, all the while knowing they are being observed. This scene is one of the show's delights.

After all this, do you remember that little ballet dancer from Paris, brought in by the wily Hugo to distract Frederick?

House guest Romainville (John C. Vennem) has agreed to pretend she is his niece, but finds the whole plot gone wildly astray when Isabelle's awful mother (Debra Jo Rupp) although ordered to stay in her room and eat crackers, invades the party and discovering in Capulut, Mme. Desmermortes long-suffering wheel chair attendant (Tandy Cronyn) a long lost cohort, invades the party in outrageous borrowed finery and sets all plots awry.

Given such a mish-mash of plot and characters, the play would seem to defy resolution, but Madame Desmermortes, reigning from her wheelchair sees to it that it has one.

Isabelle has hard time of it and has even had to take part in a wild hair-pulling set-to with Diana in which her gorgeous dress is torn, and she's had to have a chilling dip in a shallow fountain and ends up a bit bedraggled (in a scene reminiscent of Lisa in "My Fair Lady," when she asks the uncaring Hugo what is to become of her) but she has a lot of spirit and is especially charming when she and Diana's father decide to tear up money as a dirty-rotten thing that never makes anyone happy!

All in all, it ends up a charming play, quick-paced and eventful with all cast members totally in command, smartly robed in stunningly-right period costumes.

And although Anouilh, in translation of comedy, does not seem as witty as Wilde, he is no slouch and the laughs are many, there in a line as simple-seeming as the "oodles of noodles (without butter and salt)" that weaves through all the angst. And the noodle-man Messerschmann's thwarted attempt to return to Krakow poverty ends the play on a delightful note.

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