STAGE REVIEW : A Lighthearted Evening With Dickens’ ‘Woomen’

How many women can you fit into one fast-moving show? An avalanche? A baker’s dozen?

A Dickens’ dozen, if you ask Miriam Margolyes. That adds up to about 15 (give or take a woman) and is considerably more interesting than anything a baker might cook up.

Margolyes, who received a lot of attention for her performance as Flora Finching in the 1988 film version of Dickens’ “Little Dorrit,” has since formed a professional alliance with the author, the results of which can be seen at the Tiffany Theatre under the title: “Wooman, Lovely Wooman, What a Sex You Are!” It’s a comic collage of female portraits culled from the pages of the Dickens canon: Shy, sweet, eternally pubescent young things at the seemingly perpetual age of 17; bold, cold, formidable, odd or strange ones of any uncertain age whatever.

Margolyes, who is herself short, round and impish, with expressive eyes, is not only tuned in to the author’s mind, but to his libido. She presents these woomen (the spelling of choice, she tells us, in Dickens’ day) with abundant personal footnotes. The footnotes elaborate on these ladies’ peculiarities, as well as the peculiarities of the man who created them, modeling them loosely after the women in his life, with whom, it seems, he had a Dickens of a time.

That, at least, is the impression we are left with as we listen to Margolyes chattering along, feeding us information, as she races through a gallery of distinct and amusing types, not all of them female (the title itself is a quote from “Bleak House’s” ballet master, Mr. Turveydrop), but presented here with a distinctly cartoonish edge that was certainly part of the Dickensian style, but which also puts limits on profundity.

This is perfectly all right, since Margolyes does not pretend to offer more than a brisk, lighthearted evening in the company of the neurotic master novelist. It is serious only in the anguished picture she paints of a compulsive and unhappy man, as she draws her connections between Dickens’ real-life nurse, his mother, his wife (from whom he became estranged), his obsessional loves for young female relations and the characters that eventually found their way into his books.

Yet even as she delivers this portrait of the troubled writer, she keeps the tone and context chipper, in adherence to the show’s primary purpose. She has tongue-in-cheek fun with his fondness for 17-year-old girls and offers savvy, deliberately overblown portrayals of Dickens’ older harridans.

The women range from the sordid splendors of “Martin Chuzzlewit’s” Mrs. Gamp (the midwife and layer-out of corpses who “hatched ‘em and dispatched ‘em”) to the more familiar faces of Mrs. Nickleby, “David Copperfield’s” Mrs. Micawber, and such tender shoots as “Copperfield’s” Dora and “The Old Curiosity Shop’s” Little Nell.

Along the way, Margolyes also dips into “Oliver Twist,” “Dombey and Son,” “Great Expectations,” “Bleak House” and “Little Dorrit,” recreating not only her Flora Finching but also throwing in Miss Wade for good measure.

Dickens, who could coin the most intoxicating character names in the English language, also had a remarkable career as a solo reader of his own work. We cannot attest to his quality as a performer, but we can vouch for the vividness, richness and complexity of another Dickens proselytizer, the late Emlyn Williams and his one-man “Charles Dickens.”

Margolyes doesn’t deliver anything quite that unforgettable. But what she does offer is a cozy visit with some deftly etched women by one of literature’s greatest inventors of characters, second perhaps only to Shakespeare.

At 8532 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 and 8 p.m. Indefinitely. Tickets: $18-$20; (213) 652-6165).