Quoting Messeur Sondheim: "Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns, bring on the lovers, liars and clowns."
Love, lie and clown they do in The Gamester, Nevada Conservatory Theatre's lewd and loony kick-starter of UNLV's mainstage season.
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum with a French accent and Vegas compulsions, The Gamester is a farce so frenetic it makes the Keystone Kops seem as if they stopped off for baguettes at a Parisian bistro. But comedy, whether drawing-room clever or broad satire, is a precision instrument, and for all its ribald, gargantuan gusto, Gamester doesn't spill into undisciplined mugging under Director Michael Lugering's sure, steady hand. Gamester is playwright Freyda Thomas' riff on Jean Francois Regnard's 1696 verse comedy, Le Joueur, satirizing upper-crust French society's obsession with games of chance. On a Vegas stage? Oui! Oui! C'est naturel.
A comedy of human quirks and balls-out buffoonery retaining Regnard's rhyming, rhythmic dialogue, Gamester spins around vice-addled Valére (Stephen Crandall), a compulsive gambler in love with beautiful Angélique (Lisa Easley), who insists her fiancé abandon his gaming addiction—except Valére is so far in arrears he figures (with gambling-addict logic) that more wagering will dig him out of deep debt. Valeré's father, Thomas (splendid Michael Tylo, doing "domineering" as if he invented it) refuses to cover his son's losses until the wayward lad reforms, while exhausted servant Hector (frantic but droll Brandon Burk—think: a young Jack Gilford in Forum) barely keeps Valeré's creditor-wolves at bay.
Around this conundrum revolves a rollicking band of schemers, sex addicts, yearning lovers, doofuses and fops. Hilariously horny Madame Securitée (Jennifer Williams in a go-for-it performance) is a wealthy, widowed old minx whose cash is catnip to reluctant Valére, rendered a rubber-legged shell after surrendering to her sexual exertions in a bed-rocking workout. "Men," she says—i.e., 18- to 80-year-olds who wind up in her frilly britches—"they all look alike in the dark."
Dana Martin is acidly amusing and oozes overripe sensuality as black-clad widow Argante, Angélique's older sister, who also longs for Valére while fleeing the fawning love pleas of smitten Marquis de Fauxpas (flamboyantly funny Steven Fehr), a fey, stuttering suitor whose fashion sense could scare Elton John straight in any century. As Dorante, Valére's blobbish, dotty relic of an uncle who's also pining for Angélique, Steve Peterson initially overplays spastic gestures but comes into funnier focus in Act II—as does his awakened sexual prowess, thanks to Madame Securitée. And Melanie Ash does uptight with tight-assed relish as Angélique's guardian, Madame Préferée, who conspires with Dorante to keep Valére and Angélique apart while bemoaning the lack of a man to give her "field" a good "plowing."
Interlocking and underhanded, the madcap plots collide in Act II, when franc-strapped Valére, after vowing his reformation to Angélique, sneaks into the casino, followed by his sweetie disguised as a man, and winds up in a high-stakes game: he playing her, disguised as a him, so she (as he) can spy on him, who's unaware he's playing against her (who looks like a him). Simple as une, deux, trois.
As Valére, Crandall is a robust comic force, his drunken swaggering, manic self-pity and larcenous plotting never denting his impish likability. As lovely, levelheaded Angélique, the only sanity—and audience surrogate—amid the insanity, Easley is too demure around her daft co-stars throughout Act I. Calmness isn't presence, which is lacking until she goes undercover in Act II and lights the sparks that fire up The Gamester finale.
Lavish period clothes by "costume coordinator" Katrina Hertfelder—lush, satin coats; silky, colorful fabrics; hip-high leather boots; ornately woven shirts; boldly patterned vests—are a sumptuous spectacle. Joe Varga's sets sparkle with depth and detail, especially his opulent casino with winking Vegas touches. Even Nick Rissman's organ-like music mixes courtly themes with snatches of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
Sending his actors sprawling around stage, yet knowing when to play a scene small, tossing off spry sight gags (cleavage-yielding whips and handcuffs!), having his actors address each other and us as co-conspirators, Lugering ties it together with a satirist's sense of farcical fun.
As Messeur Sondheim's Forum musical mood-setter merrily reminds us: "Goodness and badness, manifest madness, this time it all turns out all right. Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight."
Let The Gamester begin.