Kent Thompson certainly didn’t take the easy way into Denver. He took the funniest.
The old axiom is an old axiom for a reason: Tragedy is easy. Comedy is hard. And “A Flea in Her Ear,” Thompson’s first directing effort as the Denver Center Theatre Company’s new artistic director, is hardy-har har. Writer John Mortimer, the Brit who has breathed wonderful new life into Georges Feydeau’s 1907 French farce, would appreciate that awful pun. His dialogue is clever, his puns plentiful, his plot well-constructed and the resulting physical comedy sidesplitting.
As “Flea” opens, it doesn’t look or feel much like a new era at the DCTC, which has long reveled in staging erudite French farces. The set is sleek and sophisticated, the period costumes expectedly elegant.
But from the first words out of Douglas Harmsen’s consonant-challenged mouth, one can just feel the wind being ripped from the Denver Center’s bag. “Hare-ful!” he pleads. “Please be hare-ful!” Hysterical, this is. Erudite, this is not. Nor stodgy, nor pompous.
You see, if Viagra existed a century ago, “Flea” never would have been written. It’s a sex romp about a woman with a bug in her ear – she’s become convinced her suddenly sexually uninterested husband is having an affair. To test his fidelity, she sends a letter from an imaginary admirer, suggesting a tryst at a sin din wonderfully titled the Coq d’Or Hotel, which introduces a parade of dazzling characters and dizzying mix-ups.
With its silly sexual innuendo and suggestive antics, you can imagine some in the theater intelligentsia turning up their noses. If so, actor Bill Christ will be happy to grab their proboscises between his fingers and yank hard.
Mortimer, now 82 and creator of the “Rumpole of the Bailey” series after a 30-year-career as a trial lawyer, is one funny guy. He once wrote, “As the son of a divorce barrister, I was fed, raised, educated and clothed entirely on the proceeds of adultery.” “Flea” is right up his alley.
He first adapted it as a 1968 film starring Rex Harrison, but a Broadway run died the next year after 11 performances. He gave permission for Thompson and dramaturg Sylvie Drake to update and Americanize his script, which they do to great complementary effect.
I’d be hard-pressed to cite another DCTC production that has elicited such unabashed, ongoing howls of laughter. That’s due to Thompson’s well-paced and precisely timed direction and a host of wonderful individual performances. It’s as if he took the biggest names in the resident company he inherited, sprinkled in a few fresh faces and said, “OK, go show off!”
By the end of the first act, the audience is already won over by the antics of newcomer Kathleen McCall (the director’s wife in a delightful, razor-sharp debut), Harmsen (in a performance worthy of Buster Keaton and Victor Borge), Randy Moore as a randy doctor, John Hutton as a comically incongruous lothario – he’s meek yet arrogant – the great Sam Gregory as a lisping, pistol-packing Spaniard, and the incomparable Jamie Horton as the faithful husband who simply has “nothing to declare” – down there.
A quick set break reveals not only an outrageously ostentatious new hotel set by Scott Weldin complete with revolving beds, but a bevy of great new characters including innkeepers played by Christ and Kathleen M. Brady (who received a warm and deserved opening ovation, presumably for simply sticking around through the regime change), Mark Rubald as a hard-core, giddyap German soldier (conceived by Feydeau as a dig at France’s enemy) and even Horton – now appearing as a drunken hall porter mistaken by all for the husband.
Horton is the Elmer’s glue for this entire piece but it’s wonderful fun to sit back and watch so many expert comedians having so much fun. No matter what the snobs may say, what Harmsen and Horton pull off here requires more pure acting chops than any dark, emotive soliloquy.
The second act is a tough act to follow. It ends in spectacular, breakneck comic chaos, complete with a rope and a dominatrix. Things never quite reach that level of ribaldry again because the plot gets kind of stuck in the whole mistaken-identity business. But it serves well enough as a comic denouement for a lighthearted evening of pure vaudevillian fun. One that has been, to quote a line from the play, “stimulating beyond endurance.” And one that will simply make your day.
Showoffs!
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
