* * *įree outdoor shows are too often worth the price of the ticket, but in New York, where talented actors all but cluster on streetcorners looking for work, they can be unexpectedly entrancing. A nice long New York run with the Williamstown cast would be just the thing. I'm sure the show will have tightened up by the time these words see print, and even in the slightly unpolished state in which I saw it, I still laughed myself silly. On the other hand, it's churlish to expect perfection out of a festival production of "On the Razzle," especially so early in its too-short run. Visible error is the death of farce, and the matinee I saw suffered from an uncertain scene change, a premature blackout and a certain looseness of timing here and there. Alas, the near-mathematical exactitude necessary to bring such precisely calculated theatrical craziness to life is not always evident in David Jones's agreeably energetic staging. With 22 speaking parts and a hell of a lot of sets, "On the Razzle" is hard to produce save at a festival, and Roger Rees, Williamstown's new artistic director, is to be commended for giving it the deluxe treatment (Neil Patel's décor is Viennese to the hilt). ![]() Scarcely a line of "On the Razzle" is unadorned with such zany furbelows, the total effect of which suggests "Finnegans Wake" rewritten by Groucho Marx, or maybe vice versa: "Do you suppose I'd let my Airedale be hounded up hill and - my heiress be mounted up hill and bank by a truffle-hound - be trifled with and hounded by a mountebank?!" You have to pay close attention to get even a fraction of the jokes, but that percentage is so funny as to keep you laughing more or less constantly. Stoppard's chief contribution is to cover Nestroy's clockwork plot with a thick frosting of the puns, portmanteau words, spoonerisms and malapropisms that come naturally to a Czech-born playwright who writes in English. Stoppard's English-language adaptation of Johann Nestroy's "Einen Jux will er sich machen," the same 1842 play whose subplot Thornton Wilder borrowed for "The Matchmaker," which in turn became "Hello, Dolly!" Any way you dish it up, it's a lunatic spree in which Herr Zangler (Michael McKean, lately of "Hairspray" and "A Mighty Wind"), purveyor of expensive foodstuffs, travels to Vienna in search of romance and promptly sticks his head into a noose of comic chaos tied and tightened by his thrill-seeking assistants Weinberl (Robert Stanton) and Christopher (John Lavelle). At no loss for words: Michael McKean and John Lavelle in 'On the Razzle.'
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