 The Very Little Theatre continues its 79th season with a four-week run of On the Razzle, a rollicking farce by Tom Stoppard.
On the Razzle is Tom Stoppard's 1981 adaptation of Johann Nestroy's Viennese play Einen Jux will er sich machen (roughly, "He Will Have His Way"). Nestroy's play already had been adapted by Thornton Wilder twice: the first version, titled The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), was far more faithful to the original material, but the second version, renamed The Matchmaker, added the character of Dolly Gallagher Levi, who later became the heroine of the Jerry Herman musical hit, Hello, Dolly!
Stoppard's farce consists of two hours of slapstick shenanigans, mistaken identities, malapropisms, and an endless stream of puns and double entendres. The wordplay is so relentless that audiences will likely catch new gags on a second or third viewing of the play.
Zangler, the twisted-tongued proprietor of an upscale grocery store in a small Austrian village, plans to marry Madame Knorr, the proprietor of a women's clothing shop in Vienna. In preparation for new life in the big city, he orders a new wardrobe and hires the fast-talking Melchior as a personal assistant. He arranges to send his niece Marie to his sister-in-law in Vienna, Miss Blumenblatt, to protect her from the penniless Sonders who is courting her. As he departs for Vienna, Zangler entrusts the operation of his business to his head clerk, Weinberl, and his young apprentice, Christopher, who decide to go "on the razzle" to Vienna.
Circumstances propel the two into a fancy restaurant in the company of Mme. Knorr and her customer, Frau Fischer (who has been roped into pretending she is Wienberl's new wife), the same restaurant to which Zangler intends to take Mme. Knorr. Several sprinting waiters, a sexually-obsessed coachman and a carefully-positioned Chinese screen come into play, and things finally seem to be settling down when the eloping Sonders and Marie enter the scene and the chaos starts anew. The various characters flee to Miss Blumenblatt's, who mistakes Wienberl and the disguised Christopher as Sonders and Marie. Eventually, all is sorted out and life returns to normal after one night "on the razzle. |
