Theatre in Review: Don't Dress for Dinner (Roundabout Theatre Company at American Airlines Theatre)

Well, it's no Boeing-Boeing. In 2008, the director Matthew Warchus, aided by Mark Rylance, Christine Baranski, and a supremely gifted cast managed to inject some jet fuel into that antique vehicle; now somebody at Roundabout decided that audiences must be eager for a second go-round. Don't Dress for Dinner is billed as a sequel to Boeing-Boeing, but all they have in common is the same author -- Marc Camoletti -- and two lead characters, named Robert and Bernard. (And, I might add, the Robert and Bernard of Boeing-Boeing are very different from their counterparts in Don't Dress for Dinner.) While Boeing-Boeing was a funny, fast-paced romp -- a triumph of style over lack of substance -- delivered with a wicked wink at the silliness of it all, its sequel never achieves comic liftoff.

Watching half a dozen perfectly good actors knock themselves out, to remarkably little effect, on the American Airlines stage, you might ask yourself how Don't Dress for Dinner came to pass. The answer lies in profound cultural differences between America and Europe. It is a typical example of a kind of continental farce that for decades was beloved in the West End but never caught on here. Like Boeing-Boeing, it ran for seven years (!) in London, a fact to remember the next time you're feeling culturally inferior to the British.

Until recently, two types of farce thrived in the West End. The homegrown version, most often by Ray Cooney and featuring titles like Run For Your Wife, Wife Begins at Forty, or Not Now, Darling, usually begins with an innocent misunderstanding or, at worst, an attempt at covering up a sexual misdemeanor. Galloping misunderstandings ensue, accompanied by mistaken identities, slamming doors, and a multitude of scantily clad blondes stuffed into closets. In the French version, of which the late Camoletti was king, a philanderer's best-laid plans slip out of control, leading to a barrage of trumped-up stories, multiple impersonations, and rapidly escalating embarrassments. That's the case with Don't Dress for Dinner. We are at the country house, northwest of Paris, of Bernard and his wife, Jacqueline. She is heading off for the weekend to tend her ailing mother. He is staying at home; unbeknownst to his spouse, he is awaiting the arrival of Suzanne, his lover, for a clandestine fling. Also on the guest list are Robert, Bernard's best friend, and a hired cook. Little does Bernard know, however, Jacqueline is having an affair with Robert; learning that he is on the way, she decides to stay at home, too, hoping for a late-night game of musical beds. When Suzette, the hired cook, arrives, she is mistaken for Suzanne. Suzanne, the last to show up, therefore must take on the identity of Suzette, a task for which she is staggeringly ill-prepared. The lies snowball from there, leading to disasters sexual, marital, and culinary.

These plays are really a kind of exercise in geometry -- they're more like theorems, really -- and the elegance of their construction is of vital importance; here, clarity equals hilarity. Don't Dress for Dinner violates this ironclad law in several respects. As opposed to Boeing-Boeing, with its easily parsed one-man-three-girlfriends setup, the premise of Don't Dress for Dinner doesn't really make sense. If Jacqueline is having an affair with Robert, why doesn't she know that he is coming to visit? If Bernard is planning on having a weekend in bed with Suzanne, why is Robert along for the ride? If Robert has just returned from Kuala Lumpur, how have he and Jacqueline been conducting a liaison?

Also, farce should start out in a low-key manner, with at least a nod to everyday reality, and slip into hysteria bit by bit; the more one underplays, the bigger the laughs. In the first few minutes of John Tillinger's production, both Adam James and Ben Daniels leap around John Lee Beatty's attractive half-timbered set, looking like advanced cases of St. Vitus dance; as the plot keeps twisting, they have to constantly up the ante until they are twitching like deranged puppets.

As Suzette, who grudgingly takes on a false identity (and shakes down both Robert and Bernard for hundreds of francs in the process), Spencer Kayden acts as something of a brake on the hysteria, facing each new development with gimlet eyes, a curled lip, and an outstretched hand awaiting the next cash payment. (She also dances a mean tango when the occasion calls for it.) At the same time, her triple-thick ersatz French accent can be a trial; she mangles so many English words that she makes Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau sound like Demosthenes. (At one point, she even exclaims "Oooh, La La," which does nothing for the authenticity of her characterization.) And when she gets into the game, trying to impersonate a social butterfly from the Parisian haut monde, her hambone instinct kicks in and she starts carrying on like the men. Jennifer Tilly, dressed by William Ivey Long in an outfit that screams "floozie," complete with a leopard coat and a little black dress that strains to contain her vast décolletage, seems to have wandered in from some other play altogether -- maybe a William Inge drama set in a snowbound roadhouse -- but her deadpan line readings are something of a relief amid the general chaos. She also amuses by slipping out of an amorous embrace in a manner similar to a dancer bending under a limbo stick, and by entering from the kitchen looking like the survivor of a natural disaster, her uniform all but wilting off her body. The best of the lot, however, is Patricia Kalember's elegantly dressed and coiffed Jacqueline; if everyone else in the cast copied her skillful throwaway style, Don't Dress for Dinner would be a far more enjoyable entertainment.

None of them are helped by Robin Hawdon's English adaptation, which emphasizes dreadful puns and wheezy rhyming gags. Realizing that Suzanne will have to prepare dinner, Robert tells Bernard, "We've got a hooker at the cooker." When Suzette is forced -- please don't ask why -- to impersonate Robert's niece, she grabs him in an embrace and says, "You're really quite a hunk, unk." Did I mention that the house's two guest bedrooms are known as the piggery and the cowshed?

Anyway, in addition to Beatty's lovely interior, Ken BIllington's lighting helps keep things bright and brassy, and David Van Tieghem's amusing sound design includes the French version of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" -- something which, I freely admit, I never expected to hear in my adult life.

I feel certain that you're going to see the name One Man, Two Guvnors appear in reviews this morning; invidious comparisons will be made, which isn't really fair. The former, with one foot in the works of Goldoni and the other in the British music hall, makes for an apples-and-oranges comparison with this piece of continental frou-frou. Then again, both require high-style comic acting, which only one of them possesses. Style is everything in shows like Don't Dress for Dinner, and that's precisely what it is missing in all departments; the plotting and the execution are sloppy, and the laughs are few and far between. --David Barbour