BWW Reviews: THE IMAGINARY INVALID from ACT 1

In a stylish and immensely entertaining fashion, director Melissa Bedinger Hade and her capable and confident band of merry players deliver a pleasantly diverting late-summer offering of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid to open ACT 1's 2010-11 season with vigorous aplomb at Darkhorse Theatre.

Utilizing a contemporary translation by James Magruder (featuring music by Gina Leishman), the production is an artful blend of period thought and manners, anachronistic flashes of whimsy and genial flights of fancy that delightfully skewer medicine and health care, conventional thought and wisdom to illustrate that the current debate on the same subjects is really nothing new. In keeping with Moliere's rather frenzied sense of humor, Hade stages the prologues and interludes designed to keep the audience involved amid the more staid moments of the onstage action. These divertissements are amusing moments that approach total lunacy; while they have little to do with the plot, they are often laugh-out-loud funny.

Although Magruder has a tendency to use far too many fart jokes and refers rather incessantly to Argan's unseemly fascination with his own bodily functions, he does follow Moliere's lead: a fart joke is a fart joke is a fart joke, whether it's written by Moliere or updated by a contemporary playwright, n'est ce pas?

Played against the backdrop of Jessica Phillips' set, which seems rather clumsily realized and cluttered (while her lighting design is well-plotted and superbly executed), the play's action moves somewhat slowly in Act One, but picks up speed in Act Two as the supporting players take up the charge of refuting Argan's misguided notions about love, life and flatulence.

Hade manages to elicit some delightful work from her talented cast, particularly in the completely naturalistic performance of Danny Proctor in the lead role of the supremely hypochondriachal Argan, the imaginary invalid himself. Proctor delivers his lines, including Magruder's modern updates that employ the current vernacular, with an easy grace that clearly underscores the character's upper class deportment.

Paired with Proctor, Lynda Cameron-Bayer fares rather less successfully, although she's certainly no less entertaining, as Toinette, the tart-tongued servant who harbors deeper feelings for her employer.

Linda Speir is delightfully arch as Argan's second wife Beline, swanning around the stage with a tall ship atop her elaborately styled coiffure, even while flirting audaciously with the notary Bonnefoi, played skillfully by the golden-throated Daniel Sadler.

Amanda Bailey is compellingly melodramatic as Argan's lovestruck daughter Angelique and Robert Grider matches her performance with his own as her smitten suitor Cleante.

Randal Cooper is the handsome and confident Dr. Diafoirus who is trying to foist his moronic son Thomas upon the unsuspecting Angelique as her intended husband-to-be. Argan, seeking his own personal HMO by marrying his daughter off to a family of doctors, seemingly overlooks the obviously daft Thomas' onstage antics. Matthew Scott Baxter pulls out all the stops to deliver a perfectly pitched comic performance that is multi-layered and hilarious. You'll find yourself watching Baxter in every scene in which he is featured, so wonderfully wacky is his performance.

Rounding out the cast is Dresden Leebron as Argan's lovely and manipulative younger daughter Louise and Hank Hildebrand as Argan's more pragmatic brother Beralde.

- The Imaginary Invalid. By Moliere. Translated and adapted by James Magruder. Directed by Melissa Bedinger Hade. Produced by Sara Steinmetz and Melissa Bediger Hade. Presented by ACT 1 at Darkhorse Theatre, Nashville. Through August 28. For reservations, call (615) 726-2281, for more information about the company, visit www.ACT1online.com.

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