Bada bing! The Bard goes Vegas in Oregon

ASHLAND, Ore. — Shakespeare cavorts in Rat Pack-era Las Vegas. A George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber valentine to 1920s Broadway returns. Swiss-style surrealism is plumbed. Two edgy card sharps square off in a bleak urban rooming house.

The opening shows in Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2004 season cover a wide span of theatrical and thematic territory. And collectively, they offer at least a couple of good excuses to visit Ashland, before the crowds start descending on this Southern Oregon cultural mecca in summer for the fest's open-air Shakespeare offerings.

This winter OSF is making do without some prominent members of its acting company, eight of whom are in England for the British debut of "Continental Divide" by David Edgar. (The two-part Edgar drama, about the American political landscape right and left, had its world premiere in Ashland in February 2003. It's now on the boards in Birmingham, England, and will run at London's Barbican Theatre from March 20 through April 4.)

Present and accounted for in the newest slate of indoor Ashland productions, however, is the kind of bracing directorial clarity that distinguishes the zestier OSF shows from the more turgid ventures of this venerable rep company — which has enough built-in appeal to attract day-trippers and vacationers from throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, no matter what's on the marquee.

Last year, roughly 381,000 tickets were sold to OSF's eight-month season of 11 plays. Though that added up to the second-highest attendance in OSF's 68-year history, artistic director Libby Appel and executive director Paul Nicholson say their three-stage, nonprofit theater operation (the largest on the West Coast) still has felt the financial pinch squeezing most Northwest arts groups.

The $20.9 million annual budget was designed to adjust to the new economic climate, and to offset sluggish advance sales for 2004. Yet this fiscal caution isn't visible on the boards. OSF's production values are as classy as ever in the shows that just opened at the 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre. They are:

'The Comedy of Errors'

This frisky OSF treatment of Shakespeare's double-twins farce is replete with visual flash and garish gimmickry. It all serves director Bill Rauch's fizzy "Viva Las Vegas" staging concept.

Here, Antipholus (Ray Porter), the hick from Syracuse, and his put-upon servant Dromio (Christopher DuVal), are ga-ga innocents in a late 1950s, neon-lit desert playground packed with high-rollers, statuesque showgirls and pre-"Sopranos" Mob enforcers.

Their long-estranged twin brothers (also played by Porter and DuVal) are worldly guys-about-the-strip. And the two sisters the Syracusans encounter? Adriana (Crystal Fox) is a spoiled yet neglected Vegas wife dripping diamonds and mink, while her bookish sister, Luciana (Aisha Kabia) looks like she'd be more at home on a Seven Sisters campus than in Caesar's Palace showroom.

As the mistaken-identity plot clicks along, Rauch and wizard set designer William Bloodgood shuttle the action from one outlandish casino to another. A slinky chanteuse singing standards, and bursts of brassy jazz, fuel Todd Barton's sound score. And the Vegas-cool period costumes by Joyce Kim Lee and gaudy lighting by Robert Peterson are great retro-fun.

The slew of sight gags can, at times, overwhelm the dialogue. And few in the cast have Porter's knack for delivering even the most expository speeches with élan and clarity.

There's so much popping, however, that this two-hour visit to Sin City is well worth a gamble.

'The Visit'

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's renowned allegorical drama, about a rich woman's return to her hometown, doesn't get around like it used to.

That's one reason to catch OSF's "The Visit." A better one: director Kenneth Albers' arresting adaptation of the scathing 1956 "tragic comedy" (Dürrenmatt's term), which still singes and stings.

As expected, the play begins and ends at a railway station in Gullen, an impoverished European town so down on its luck trains rarely stop there anymore. The citizenry of Gullen turns out en masse, though, to welcome back native daughter Claire Zachanassian (Demetra Pittman), who left decades earlier and returns the richest woman in the world.

Everything in "The Visit" hinges on Claire's venomous "gift" to Gullen. She offers $1 billion to the community — if one of its residents murders her former beau, Josef (Richard Elmore), now a well-liked local shopkeeper.

The conundrum makes a brilliant focal point for Dürrenmatt's discomfiting inquiry into revenge, moral expediency and the justifications a society uses (say, "neutral" Switzerland in World War II) to cover its complicity in evil.

Albers' choreographic treatment of the lightly modernized text underscores the play's wicked humor and white-knuckle tension. Albers departs from convention, however, by staging a critical scene without dialogue — which ratchets up the anxiety over Josef's fate even more.

The eerie grotesqueries of Pittman's Claire, and stylized performances by John Pribyl (as Gullen's mayor), and others, sharply offset Elmore's more recognizably human Josef.

The production stretches its conceits to the snapping point a few times: Albers' "Visit" runs nearly three hours, including an unneeded coda. But this is a rare chance to see OSF's designers and actors apply their gifts boldly, and successfully, to an absurdist European classic.

'The Royal Family'

There's always at least one bon-bon on OSF's winter menu. And the Kaufman-Ferber, backstage-with-the-Barrymores comedy serves as the season's brandied truffle.

Fortunately, the cloying propensities of this 1927 portrait of a clan of famed actors (inspired by Drew Barrymore's ancestors) are kept largely at bay in Peter Amster's well-dressed, generally entertaining staging.

As theatrical matriarch Fanny Cavendish, Dee Maaske spices her old-trouper valor with peppery wit. And Judith-Marie Bergan, so jarringly miscast last year as Cleopatra, hits all the right notes of glamour and exasperation as Fanny's celebrated daughter Julie.

Brent Harris is better hamming it up as Julie's ham actor brother Anthony (based on John Barrymore), than he was chewing the scene recently in Noel Coward's "Enter Laughing." But he's still a heavy hand at light comedy, and it's a relief when Jeffrey King's macho Gilbert Marshall and Richard Howard's faded matinee idol Herbert Dean apply a gentler comic touch.

Amster manages the comings, goings, phone calls and general pandemonium of the Cavendishes' Manhattan household adroitly. And set designer Richard L. Hay captures the flat's fading grandeur perfectly, right down to the fraying Oriental rugs.

Also playing at OSF, in the 300-seat New Theatre:

'Topdog/Underdog'

Though scrupulously performed by frequent OSF leading man Kevin Kenerly and solid G. Valmont Thomas (a former Seattle stage regular), this Pulitzer Prize-winner by Suzan-Lori Parks about sparring siblings still feels like a sizzling one-act trapped inside a bloated two-acter.

Director Tim Bond (another Seattle alum) gives the script a more intimate staging than it usually receives, with spectators on three sides of Scott Bradley's compact set. And Thomas puts his own stamp on the "top dog" older-brother character of Lincoln, making him a more robust and dominant, less depressive figure than in the Broadway and Seattle Repertory Theatre productions.

Yet despite Parks' crackling verbal exchanges, and the play's intriguing subtext of family and societal dysfunction, this symbol-laden study of two African-American brothers caught in a dead-end cycle still rambles when it should tighten up. And the violent ending still doesn't have the force of inevitability — even when executed as well as it is at OSF.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com