Word: feydeau
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Short v. Tall. The plot is Simon simple; yet it has all the engaging velocity of a Feydeau farce. Two short and jolly people, Eddie Kettle (Charles Repole) and Elsie Darling (Virginia Seidel), have just got married to two very tall and stuffy people, Georgina Kettle (Spring Fairbank) and Percy Darling (Nicholas Wyman). Precipitately, the foursome is separated as the two short people sail on a Hudson River excursion liner, and the tall people miss the boat. The couples reunite at the upriver Honeymoon Inn, where the explanations get hot, long and sticky, tempers get short, and the fun gets...
...sense of comic misunderstanding, Charon was a standout onstage. One awed critic, reviewing his performance as Sganarelle in Moliere's Don Juan, observed that he could command a scene even when he was "simply standing onstage and watching." As a director, he could bring off the most frantic Feydeau farce with clockwork-perfect timing, achieving maximum impact...
...terms of dramatic biodynamics, Schisgal has attempted to fuse the zany family comedy of You Can't Take It with You with the door-slamming wackiness of Feydeau's geometrically composed bedroom-chases-cum-orgies. Unfortunately, Schisgal's characters are as charmless as unthreaded spools, and he has yet to learn the primal lesson of the Feydeau farce: comic tension depends on who is hiding behind the door rather than who breezes casually through...
...establishing his identity, address, occupation and, if a foreigner, his passport number. Fichisme is not only a chore for hoteliers, who must turn in the forms to the commissariat. For loving-if uncertified-couples, it can also be a mortifying ordeal, involving all the devices and evasions of a Feydeau comedy...
...best piece of the evening was Todd Bolender's Souvenirs, a spoof of pre-World War I manners, mores and dress, with a setting that suggested a hotel in a Feydeau comedy. There is a small army of standard farce characters, including a jealous husband, a languid vamp, a preening gigolo. Weighed down with a pound or so of mascara, Manola Asensio was a wonderfully deadpan, sultry vamp, but the farce- predictable bedroom mix-ups, a boop-a-doop beachside romp-is forced...