Mary Testa, Michael McGrath, Michael Urie, and Talene Monahon    photos Carol Rosegg

 

 

                                                         By Ron Cohen

 

Believe it or not, some two hours of Russian-themed political corruption can provide you with a rollicking good time. You just have to forget our current imbroglios in Washington, DC, and turn yourself over to Red Bull Theater’s exuberant mounting of The Government Inspector.

 

This production of the Russian comic masterwork by Nikolai Gogol, sometimes known as The Inspector General and dating back to 1836, uses a sprightly adaptation by American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Hatcher keeps things in 19^th Century Russia, but gives the dialogue a bright contemporary spin. And Jesse Berger, artistic director of Red Bull, known especially for its fondness for Jacobean revenge plays, demonstrates a grand flair for comedy in his appropriate anything-for-a-laugh staging. The approach is made valid by his 14-person cast loaded with superlative farceurs and headed by the especially superlative Michael Urie. 

 

Things take place in a backwater town, where bribery, incompetence and political favors and expediency are the everyday stuff of life. (Is everything old really new again, as Peter Allen once sang?) The new hospital has been so badly constructed that it’s not possible to get full-size beds into the rooms. Turn it into a children’s hospital, says the mayor.

 

The mayor and his colleagues are shaken to their rotten cores, though, when rumors start that a powerful inspector from the Czar has come to town undercover. It so happens that at the same time, a ne’er-do-well lowly clerk, recently fired from his job, has wound up in town, and is rooming above the stable at local inn. His name, in full, is Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov. He has lost his money playing dice, is suffering from a hangover and pondering how handsome he’ll look should he commit suicide.

 

And who should the town moguls mistake for the undercover inspector? Of course, it’s Ivan, who immediately becomes the confused but willing recipient of all the town has to offer, including a riotously drunken dinner at the mayor’s home, handfuls of cash, and even the mayor’s petulant daughter. It all goes on until Ivan leaves town, and the officials discover their mistake, only to face another shocker with the final curtain. 

 

: Talene Monahon and Michael Urie

 

Urie makes Ivan a totally engaging fop, combining a louche delivery of laugh lines, almost reminiscent of Groucho Marx, with daredevil physical comedy. His drunken attempt to sit on an uncooperative piano stool, whose wheels have a mind of their own, is a prolonged piece of masterful laugh-getting. Ending the show’s first half, his even drunker fall from the second level of the bi-level set into the audience is worthy of a medal for valor, perhaps even a Tony, if Tonys were given for Off-Broadway bravery.

 

Urie has a perfect foil in Michael McGrath’s mayor, coloring almost every line with either a controlled fury or deep exasperation. It’s almost as if McGrath were channeling Nathan Lane in his highest dudgeon. But he definitely makes the role his own.

 

Michael McGrath (forefront) with Luis Moreno and Mary Lou Rosato

 

Such praise is not meant, however, to slight anybody else. Just about everybody contributes to the hilarity. As the mayor’s salacious wife, the inestimable Mary Testa keeps the innuendos coming in forthright fashion. The bumbling town officials include Tom Alan Robbins as the judge who allows his bailiff to raise geese in the jury box because they sound “so cute;” David Manis as the principal of the school where “a failing student is made head of the class if his father donates a new gymnasium,’ and Stephen DeRosa as the director of the aforementioned hospital, who has hired from an exchange program a doctor who speaks an incomprehensible language, played with a mastery of gibberish by James Rana.

 

Others are Arnie Burton, as the fey postmaster who opens and reads all mail before it’s delivered (he also doubles unrecognizably as Ivan’s snide servant), and Luis Moreno as the police chief, whose force, as described, would make the Keystone Cops look like a model of efficiency. Ryan Garbayo and Ben Mehl score visually as well as aurally as a tweedledum-and-tweedledee pair of gabby, roly-poly landowners, and Talene Monahon, as the mayor’s daughter, impressively turns frustration into high-decibel shrieking. Mary Lou Rosato and Kelly Hutchinson bring distinctive touches of grotesquerie to assorted servants and citizens of the town.

 

To be sure, not every comic bit is a side-splitter. Some lines have the familiar flavor of old-time vaudeville or burlesque. “Mine was a very cultured upbringing,” says the mayor’s wife. “We had a book…”

 

But the bits come so thick and fast, you don’t have time to ponder the misfires. Grin and bear them. But do so take some time to appreciate the aptness of Tilly Grimes’ blatantly character-defining costumes, and the eye-filling architecture of Alexis Distler’s two-level set, meticulously defining the play’s’ three different playing areas. The first level is divided between the study in the mayor’s house and Ivan’s room at the inn. The upper level depicts in all its florid elegance the expansive sitting room of the mayor’s house.

 

Tom Alan Robbins, Stephen DeRosa, James Rana, David Manis, Luis, Moreno, Ryan Garbayo, and Ben Mehl

 

Toward the end of the show, the mayor contemplating how he and his cohorts have been taken in, declares: “Centuries from now they’ll still be laughing at us.” As far as some 171years go at least, he’s absolutely correct.

 

Off-Broadway play

Playing at The Duke on 42^nd Street

229 West 42^nd Street

646-223-3010 Ext. 8

Dukeon42.org

Playing until June 24

 

NOTE: The show is being extended with a move to New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, for six weeks, July 5--August 20.