LIKE a meal in a expensive French restaurant, the Broadway season is ending with a fancy dessert, one of those things where a chateau is constructed out of chocolate, ice cream and meringue.
Jean Anouilh’s 1947 “Ring Round the Moon” takes place “in the winter garden of Madame Desmermortes’ chateau in France in the spring of 1912” (that about says it all) and centers around identical twins interested in the wrong girls on the eve of a ball.
If you’re going to revive fluff like this – the sell-by date of which had already passed in 1947 – it’s wise to give it a new twist. This production is pretty much old wine in old bottles.
It’s the performers who energize the thing, to a point. Toby Stephens commands the stage with cheeky verve and articulate charm.
He has a lot to do, too: He’s both Hugo, a debonair Lothario who has no heart, and twin Frederic, shy, timid, lovelorn. Watching Stephens vanish with an arrogant flourish at one side of the stage and come in with a hangdog, moping gait at the other side a second later is a real pleasure.
Hugo is dismayed that Diana, a cold-hearted heiress, has snagged Frederic. He has hired Isabelle (lovely Gretchen Egolf), an impoverished ballerina, to impersonate an alluring society belle at the ball in order to divert his brother’s emotions.
The twins are nephews of the imperious Madame, who is brought to life by Marian Seldes in a wheelchair ordering everyone about and explaining life and love and reminiscing about the mad, violent days of her aristocratic youth.
Seldes is a high, ironic comedienne of the grand old school, able to pierce with a quip or flatten with a glance. She clenches her jaws and hollows her cheeks after each devastating utterance, but the woman becomes, in Seldes’ hands, less a monster than a matchmaker, and a better one than Hugo.
Among the minor parts of the farcical pattern are Isabelle’s pushy and vulgar mother, played by Joyce Van Patten with a shrill broadness out of keeping with the rest of the play, and a daffy adventuress called India, to whom Candy Buckley brings the right note of comic mischief.
And then there are Diana, performed with beautifully sharp chic by Haviland Morris, and her father, the “melancholy millionaire” Messerschmann, touchingly incarnated by the suave, sad-eyed, baritone-voiced Fritz Weaver. Messerschmann is a paradox-loving philosopher-businessman straight out of George Bernard Shaw, but Anouilh also makes him Jewish and lends him some stereotypical traits of the Jewish financier.
Despite Messerschmann’s benevolent function, I find Anouilh’s use, here and elsewhere, of such Jewish stereotypes to be not critical of but complicit with anti-Semitism.
In general, I find Anouilh’s shallow cynicism unnourishing. “Every country has its special weaknesses, its favorite way of being false,” wrote Eric Bentley. “Anouilh [is the] French way.”
Written by Jean Anouilh. Adapted by Christopher Fry. Directed by Gerald Gutierrez. Starring Marian Seldes, Toby Stephens, Joyce Van Patten, Fritz Weaver. Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues. (212) 239-6200.
