The Lively Lad, the fourth of the six full-length plays in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is sheer unadulterated bliss. Imagine Oscar Wilde teamed up with Joe Orton to create an outrageously droll plot for which Gilbert and Sullivan supply epigrammatic bursts of song. With The Lively Lad, the mission has been accomplished with dash, vigor, style and flair, and it's all been done (except for the music by Michael Silversher) by one man: the amazing Quincy Long. Everything works to perfection in ATL's dazzling presentation: associate artistic director Timothy Douglas' snappy direction, a dream cast that makes a star turn of every character, on-the-button costumes by Suttirat Larlarb, another stunning set by resident scenic designer Paul Owen, and jaunty musical accompaniment by music director/pianist Scott Kasbaum.
Set "some time ago" in an unnamed metropolis that could be London or Dublin, The Lively Lad would have us believe that spoiled debutantes such as Little Eva (Holli Hamilton) require eunuchs to help them prepare and compete to be chosen as the perfect Junior Miss at the annual Patriarch's Ball. But Little Eva's widower father Jonathan Van Huffle (Marc Vietor) has violated class boundaries by falling in love with Miss McCracken (Shannon Holt), a tea-room waitress who is adamantly opposed to the barbaric custom of castration and wants to overthrow the Patriarch, who rules with an iron hand the way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's South-American dictators do. "This is a dangerous woman," Jonathan's investment adviser Martin (Dennis Kelly) tells him and with good reason from Martin's point of view, because he's selling shares in a company called Versatile, which deals in eunuchs.
Long's zany, brainy and very funny conception never flags as it climbs from one peak to another. Little Eva's father dotes on his pretty daughter, but her selfishness and tantrums know no limits. She threatens to starve herself if he doesn't buy her a eunuch.And she wants nothing to do with principled Miss McCracken, who is a poor nobody to her. Chaperoned by Dorothea (Celia Tackaberry), her faithful but cowed servant, Little Eva goes to the tea room where her father's intended works. A confrontation gets the unfortunate woman fired.
Meanwhile, a handsome young man named Gideon (Lea Coco) turns up at the sumptuous Van Huffle mansion with a note pinned to his shirt indicating he's a gift from a secret organization called Xerxes. He's a eunuch, of course, and though Jonathan invents wild stories about his being a relative, Little Eva, who's no fool, sees through things and claims him for herself. Gideon carries with him a box whose contents scotch all doubts that he's a eunuch.
Two veteran ATL actors -- William McNulty as Jameson, Van Huffle's pesky old soldier major-domo, as earthy as one of Shakespeare's rustics, and Fred Major as a boorish boozing friend of Jonathan -- have never been better. Major's companion and fellow Xerxes member is Colin McPhillamy, who plays Shotworthy in a most extraordinary drunk scene with body language that defies gravity. The versatile Major and McPhillamy slip into various other roles at times. Little Eva's eunuch, while coaching her for the big Joan of Arc scene she plans to do at the Patriarch's Ball, digresses to educate her -- which interests her greatly -- in erotic delights in which eunuchs have been skilled from ancient times. Little Eva's Joan of Arc scene at the big event is a riotous culmination involving the entire cast. Miss McCracken, whom the Patriarch had ready to burn at the stake for treason, manages unlike Joan to escape the flames after the Patriarch is fatally bashed with an ax by a rather unlikely actor in Little Eva's dramatic offering.
Joyous song then erupts, and loose ends are tied up in this off-beat concoction of old world charm with a modern twist.
