Word: gaston
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...situation. It's Saturday night, Madame Baltin, your latest romantic prey, has become tantalizingly available with the departure of her attendant herr, but you have a lingering engagements with pesky Ida (Carolyn Casanave). Despair not if you are Baron Ferdinand Rommer (Rex D. Hays): just have ever-solicitous Gaston ring with some appropriately vague but familiar explanation--"affairs of state" and all. Cole Porter, you certainly know your noble playboys well...
...Huntington, Lazarus succeeds in entertaining the audience with the predictable but predictably amusing romantic romps of Baron Ferdinand Rommer and his devoted servant and apprentice playboy Gaston. For the Baron, love is a sport--its victories to be savored like any triumph, its game rules as important as in any game, and its old conquests good only for colorful but dispassionate reminiscing. His servant Gaston, his name seemingly synonymous with the command "service" and too often, invoked with the same sensitivity, knows love only from the Baron's recounts and, as he laments, "from an occasional peak through the keyhole...
...Gaston enters the game as a player himself soon enough. Calling to cancel an inconvenient appointment for the Baron opportunity answers, and her name is Maria. Maria herself is only a spectator of Madame Baltin (Lynne Wintersteller), and like Gaston she wants no longer simply to observe life but rather to live it like a lady--"to take two baths a day, go riding, and cheat on her husband in the afternoon...
Dousing herself with her lady's perfume, Maria--"Mimi" to her employers--assumes entirely the identity of her mistress as Gaston likewise plays the Baron. His own evening an unusual disappointment, the real Baron returns home, assumes the role of the servant, and establishes the framework for the ensuing comedy of affected manners...
...reminds us just how much we do know. Imagine, if you will, a mere servant attempting to love a real person. You never know, it might work out, but only when the lady or gentleman in question is not really a lady or gentleman. At every opportunity, Porter shows Gaston and Maria unable to fathom the protocol of the Penthouse...