Stage and Film : Wide Gap Between Intent and Execution in ‘Miser’

Director David Chambers is not lacking for ambition. With considerable fanfare and elaborate attention he has taken Moliere’s “The Miser” and refashioned it, at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, into a comedy-burlesque.

Funny? Rarely. The idea of comedy-burlesque is not far from the mark when you consider that Moliere, a farceur of the first water, had much of the vaudevillian in him. But it misfires. By taking a literal translation of “The Miser” and matching it up (less rather than more) with Henry Fielding’s wilder and free-wheeling adaptation, Chambers has created a new text of his own: colloquial, quaint, rash and verrrry broad.

Since he is also directing the play in this case, his translation becomes what program notes identify as “production-specific.” In plain English this means that what we get is the David Chambers Show: a play cut and stitched by him to fit his own concept.

And that’s the rub. The concept is a mishmash, with the production’s context as muddled as its text. Ralph Funicello’s imposing 19th-Century hotel de ville set is a splendid leaky palace in grand ruin. But it hardly connects with designer Shigeru Yaji’s wigs and costumes--a cross between drab early 19th-Century weeds and brightly colored clown imitations, especially the foppishly trendy garments worn by Harpagon’s son Cleante and his sister Elise.

The production professes to be color-blind, but has a lone African-American actor (Reg E. Cathey) in a sea of white faces, which makes such democratic aims empirically unpersuasive. In addition, a white man’s speech late in the play about Africa as a place of “general unrest” and “cheap labor” where “an enterprising man can do well,” provides a spectacularly tasteless and insensitive juxtaposition.

There’s a lot of rhetoric in the program about contemporary echoes and how Moliere’s generic broadside on greed connects with our own recessionary times. It’s a claim never borne out on stage.

There is as wide a gap between intent and execution here as there was last year in Chambers’ Caribbean “Twelfth Night” at the same theater. This does not mean that this “Miser” does not have its moments. It means only that they are few and fall far short of whatever grand design it was that Chambers had in mind.

Left to his own devices, Jonathan McMurtry’s Harpagon, the miser of the title, is a wily old codger with lots of juice in his rapacious little soul. McMurtry plays it straight, making no bones about where Harpagon’s affections lie. And while a long monologue in which he tries to enlist the audience’s help in finding out who stole his strongbox is overextended by the director/translator, McMurtry manages to make it watchable--but only just.

You do not, however, believe that the silly, squealy Elise (Terres Unsoeld, totally overdoing the cartooning) and that dandy of a Cleante (a shallow Cathey) could possibly be Harpagon’s children. For one thing, where did they get the money for all their finery when neither is employed and papa is not about to part with a single sou?

Details, you say, but details are what finally have to add up. Jane Galloway’s pragmatic Frosine is a refreshing contrast to the mincing of the thwarted lovers, including Lynnda Ferguson’s swoony Marianne and Jeffrey Combs earnest and ardent Valere, the young steward in love with Elise.

Faring far better, as usual in Moliere, are the servants: Ron Boussom as Master Jacques, cook, coachman and sometime mediator to Harpagon, and Don Took as La Fleche, a rascally fellow who knows how to play all ends against the middle and emerge unscathed.

On occasion Chambers can be inventive, especially so in a scene involving an ambulatory suit of armor, and in the better exchanges between Master Jacques and the boss. But Chambers’ serious productions at South Coast (“Search and Destroy,” “Going for the Gold,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman”) have been much more satisfying.

Could it be that comedy is just not his thing? He almost always pushes the jokes too far. In the end, the satirical quotient of this “Miser,” the very thing Chambers sought to make relevant, is merely trivialized. And not many laughs are had along the way.

The action throughout is backed up by Edith Piaf singing “La Vie En Rose” and other ballads. Exactly why is anybody’s guess.

* “The Miser,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays,8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 14. $14-$34; (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Jeffrey Combs: Valere

Terres Unsoeld: Elise

Reg E. Cathey: Cleante

Jonathan McMurtry: Harpagon

Don Took: La Fleche

Art Koustik: Master Simon

Jane Galloway: Frosine

Ron Boussom: Master Jacques

Lynnda Ferguson: Marianne

John Ellington: Chief of Police

Hal Landon Jr.: Anselme

Moliere’s play in a new translation by David Chambers. Director David Chambers. Sets Ralph Funicello. Lights Chris Parry. Costumes Shigeru Yaji. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Julie Haber.