Act 2 of The Ladies Man, adapted by Charles Morey from Tailleur pour Dames by Georges Feydeau, has quite a few laughs. There's much in Feydeau that is just too good to kill, no matter how ineffective the production or how damaging the adaptation. But Morey's well-cast, much traveled and repeated reworking of the great French farceur's first success doesn't make much sense (not even comic sense) and is deliberately directed to produce cynical-looking shtick. In Feydeau's iconic popular farces, Hotel Paradiso and A Flea In Her Ear, the characters rapidly slam in and out of doors, always accidentally encountering the most embarrassing others in awkward poses. Morey has them do nothing else for most of the second act, but far too mechanically by the numbers and therefore seldom surprisingly. A wee bit of believability might make all that a lot funnier and a whole lot less tiresome.
I expected a Feydeau mishmash; few trust his wonderful scripts now, and consequently most foul them up. Morey writes in the program that only A Flea In Her Ear of Feydeau's many farces is currently successful in America because only that farce has a hero who is an innocent tricked into appearing to commit adultery, while all other Feydeau heroes are adulterers. Our puritanical audiences, he says, therefore don't like the others. But likable people even in A Flea In Her Ear try to commit adultery; and the important distinction is that few of Feydeau's characters ever succeed in committing adultery. The fun is in their hopeless attempts. Considering the immorality of most American comedy plots, the whole discussion strikes me as foolish. In the blockbuster hit comedy, The Producers, the lead character finances his shows by having sex with a large group of infirm old ladies with checkbooks. Audiences just laughed.
Anyway, Morey's adaptation isn't just ham-handed: it's full of holes. Supposedly, the shop (which provided Feydeau a source of satiric comment on fashion) has now become a place for sexual assignations [the whole point of Hotel Paradiso]. But where is any staff or customer other than the doctor's Act I household and visitors? And why does a dressmaker's shop have one dress and mostly dozens of hats on display as though it were a milliner's shop? The bed on a turntable (a gimmick stolen from Feydeau's Hotel Paradiso) is shown coming in and out of the showroom through the wall with various couples in it; but it is never explained, and, though characters regard it with shock, no one comments on seeing it [What's a bed doing in a couturier's shop?].
Apparently, we've decided that Feydeau has to be played broadly; but "over the top" does not imply total dishonesty and acting so phony that none of the actors seem to be portraying anyone who believes in what he is doing. Well, one did. Mark Mineart, a big man whose superb physical comedy displays surprising grace, plays the dimwitted Prussian officer hilariously. He seems to lurch honestly and unintentionally between fury and bewilderment.
Max Robinson, playing the main role of the doctor, is in there acting every minute, all too intentionally, and frantic in his attempts to be funny. John Guerrasio (with a speech impediment taken from two other Feydeau plays, but this time a vaudeville spitting lisp) is somewhere between those two moving with elegance, despite a perpetual lean forward, but 'putting on' more vocal shtick than just the lisp. That most of the rest are unnatural, deliberate and hard working seems to be more Morey's fault than theirs.
Feydeau's wordplay comes through from time to time because these are actors who know what to do with a line if allowed to calm down and deliver it effectively. What spoils this performance is not so much the adaptation of the script or style of performance but the sense that there is no sharing of the comedy, just playing it at us in insultingly deliberate and artificial pretense. French farce is more airy and friendlier.
