Chamber Theatre cast serves 'Jeeves' well - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

CHAMBER THEATRE CAST SERVES 'JEEVES' WELL

by Mike Fischer, special to the Journal Sentinel

Although he insisted otherwise late in life, a younger and less guarded P.G. Wodehouse was open about the inherently theatrical quality of his stories and novels.

With its longstanding commitment to bringing page to stage, the Chamber Theatre is therefore ideally suited to mount playwright Margaret Raether's "Jeeves Intervenes," a loose adaptation of several Wodehouse stories featuring the foppish Bertie Wooster and his incomparable valet, Jeeves.

Under Tami Workentin's direction, the Chamber opened the Milwaukee premiere of "Jeeves" Friday night.

Set in 1926 in Bertie's London flat, the play begins with Bertie (Chris Klopatek) nursing a nasty hangover after some late-night carousing. Jeeves (Matt Daniels) comes to the rescue, serving Bertie one of his famous liquid cures.

The opening-night rendition of this particular concoction went a tad heavy on the caffeine, leading a hyped-up Klopatek to start out by cranking the laugh-o-meter much too hard, as though he didn't quite trust his material to be funny on its own.

But as every Wodehouse fan knows, Jeeves always bails out his young charge. Daniels came through, playing his straight-man role to a consistently hilarious T, and buying Klopatek some much-needed time to recover his usually spot-on comic instincts.

Klopatek did so, ably assisted by the cast of eccentrics who soon fill Bertie's flat, complicating his life and the plot while transforming moderately amusing material into enormously entertaining farce.

Laura Gordon's Aunt Agatha leads the charge. Bertie tells us that she kills rats with her teeth and wears barbed wire next to her skin, and Gordon makes us believe it, giving a straight-up rendition of one of the many shrewish characters she has played at the Milwaukee Rep. Because Gordon never overplays her hand, her Agatha is always good for a guffaw.

Peter Silbert keeps pace as Sir Rupert Watlington Pipps, a preening ex-soldier who parades around Bertie's flat as though he owns it. He certainly owned the opening-night audience, drawing appreciative laughter with every swish of his walking stick or campaign medals.

Alison Mary Forbes and Rick Pendzich round out the cast as a pair of hopelessly mismatched young lovers.

That cast gets extra mileage from every joke, thanks to Kim Instenes' splendidly ridiculous costumes. Alan Piotrowicz's lighting emphasizes the self-conscious theatricality of the play, while Aaron M. Dyszelski's brightly yellow set recalls the brief and happy interwar summer that Wodehouse regularly commemorates and his readers still love.

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