It speaks volumes to the good humor of Iola that when Allen Community College stages its spring play “Leading Ladies” — a farce about two struggling Shakespearean actors in 1950s America who disguise themselves as women in order to defraud a wealthy dowager — it will mark only the second largest public cross-dressing event in the county seat this year.
Unlike the carnival of cheap blouses and cheerful spontaneity that describes the gender-bending festivities preceding the annual Mad Bomber run, ACC’s production of “Leading Ladies” offers a crisp, well-turned, tightly acted romp that any friend of wit will love.
The play runs tonight through Saturday at 7:30 on the main stage of the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
The charm of Ken Ludwig’s 2004 play depends in large part on the skill with which the two leads manage their frequent transitions from Leo and Jack to Maxine and Stephanie.
Jason Davis exerts a mesmerizing authority in his role as Leo, the poetry-quoting, concocter of the complicated con. And as Maxine, with his tattered haystack wig and distressingly rigid breasts, he sparkles. But he earns special kudos for invoking his feminine half in a pair of patent leather heels at least two sizes too large for his feet, and for doing so with barely a stumble.
The second half of the huckster duo, Jack, is played with a jittery, comic energy by Nicholas Watson, whose real talents lie in wait for the moment he slithers into his first dress. In his appearance as Stephanie, Watson twinkles across the stage in a gown outfitted with opalescent wings, introducing himself to new acquaintances with a shy tilt of the head and a belabored curtsy. (The pair’s spur-of-the-moment scam has them raiding their Elizabethan costume trunk for women’s garb, landing Watson with the ethereal duds of Titania, the queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — hence the wings.)
The ever-compelling Emily Pierce plays Meg, the niece of the elderly target of the snow job, and the eventual love interest around which the entire burlesque begins to dissolve.
Meg’s soon-to-be-or-is-he husband, a nebbish country priest named Duncan, is the closest thing this carefree production has to an antagonist. And yet Jacob Cooper plays it in a way so loveably weird as to transform Duncan into one of this production’s most charming forces.
But then the entire eight-person cast — Rachel Mentzer, Callaway Patterson, Taylor McAvoy and Aaron Huskey, to list the other stars — is excellent.
The play’s premise — men dressing as women to perpetuate a scheme that is ultimately foiled by a romantic craving — is probably as old as plot itself (see the Hollywood classic “Some Like It Hot” for the most obvious example). And so it is a credit to this production, under the direction of Tony Piazza, that the ACC players lift Ludwig’s script into a strata that no fan of fun should miss.
