The extent to which audiences are likely to enjoy this musical adaptation of Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’ Le Triomphe De L’Amour relies in large part on whether they found Court Theatre’s 1993 production of the play sensitive or soporific. Certainly its lesson on the folly of reason untempered by emotion is equally true for highbrows and lowbrows alike. Playgoers preferring the lofty, slow-paced, delicately nuanced approach to this material are warned, however—the first goal of the show making its midwest premiere at Circle Theatre is to have fun.
The plot involves a scholarly minded brother and sister who have raised the former’s nephew to be a bloodless brainiac, pursuant to his assassinating the country’s monarch and claiming his birthright as its true king. But his usurper, ignorant of her ancestors’ crimes, has fallen in love with the would-be avenger. In order to invade his gynephobic uncle’s academy, she does what all lovesick young ladies do in 18th-century comedies—dresses up as a boy. In this disguise, she discovers that even rock-ribbed platonists are not invulnerable to flattery—and, if that doesn’t work, flat-out seduction.
Much of Marivaux’ philosophical examination has been excised to make room for Jeffrey Stock and Susan Birkenhead’s big, belting, Broadway-style score. But while the resulting confection offers less to chew over, there is no denying its toothsome appeal. Post-Sondheim influences are evident in the four-part soliloquy that brings everybody onstage to close the first act, while nostalgia buffs will revel in the ricky-ticky “Henchmen Are Forgotten.” There is also a picaresque narrative finishing in a Fantasticks tableau, a couple of Gilbert-and-Sullivan fillips and plenty of busty, lusty, gender-bending sight gags
Robert A. Knuth ‘s set and Jeffrey Kelly’s costumes are scrumptious as a box of bonbons, if a bit busy for the small stage. But director Kevin Bellie, musical director Jon Steinhagan and an agile cast navigate their cluttered confines with never a misstep. Emily Colee and Joss Nichols are a suitably pixilated pair of lovers. John Simmons, Laura Keeling and Brett Bregin Kashanitz romp it up as the protean factotums. Todd Cornils, decades too young for his role, does what he can as the pedantic Hermocrates, but cannot help but be eclipsed by Anita Hoffman’s Hesione, who not only gets the best song (the bittersweet “Serenity,” a future piano-bar standard if ever there was), but the last word as well.