One of the oldest plays on Pioneer Theatre Company's 2006-07 schedule is also one of the company's newest.
PTC gets 2007 off to a humorous start with an all-new translation/adaptation of "Tailleur pour Dames," an 1886 farce by George Feydeau.
More than 120 years after it debuted in France, PTC artistic director Charles Morey's new — and apparently the only — English translation will have, essentially, its world premiere in Salt Lake City on Friday.
Morey said he had been looking for a comedy to fill the January slot. "Feydeau had written more than 50 plays, and I looked through decades of his material. I'd find plays with different translations, but nothing struck me as being as funny as 'A Flea in Her Ear,' one of the playwright's most popular comedies.
"So I went back to the original French source material, searching on the Internet with a mouse in one hand and a French-English dictionary in the other."
Morey eliminated any scripts with big casts and those that were only one act. "Then I stumbled across this one. I felt it held a lot of promise, but as I worked on it I also found some problems. Compared to some of Feydeau's other farces, it's not as skillfully or as wonderfully crafted."
While he was still working on it, Morey took his half-completed work, now retitled "The Ladies Man," to a five-week residency as a fellow at the prestigious MacDowell Colony, an artists' retreat in Peterborough, N.H. "I discovered that Feydeau's original was not that popular when it first opened in France, so I grafted some gags from other scripts onto this play and also cut it down in terms of scope and the number of characters."
He added that very few people know anything of the original today, and those who are familiar with Feydeau's work will likely think it's a straight translation.
The cast of this premiere is led by Max Robinson as Dr. Hercule Molineux, a Parisian doctor with a young wife and a vexing problem (in the 1880s, Parisians joked about it behind the scenes; today it's the subject of Viagra commercials).
Michelle Six will play Yvonne, the doctor's pretty, younger, headstrong wife, with Kurt Zische as Aubin, a Prussian count who believes Molineux is dallying with Suzanne, a voracious femme fatale played by Anney Giobbe.
Sean Arbuckle is Etienne, Molineaux's valet, who is pursuing Marie (Cheryl Gaysunas); John Guerrasio plays Bassinet (pronounced "bass-in-ay"), the doctor's patient and best friend, a man with a strange speech impediment; and Nance Williamson is Madame Agreville, described as Molineaux's "gorgon of a mother-in-law, who makes everything worse by her constant meddling."
The second half of the comedy moves into a Parisian dress shop, where everybody is mistaken for someone else.
"It was a lot of fun writing it," Morey said, "and it should be fun rehearsing it."
And — he hopes — it should be just as much fun for the patrons who are seeing it.
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