Little Lake Theatre presents ‘Metromaniacs,’ adaptation of a French comedy
Courtesy of Little Lake Theatre
Amanada Weber and Patrick Brannan are among the performers in Little Lake Theatre’s “The Metromaniacs.”
Courtesy of Little Lake Theatre
Amanda Weber (left) and Brian Ferris in a rehearsal for “The Metromaniacs.”
Courtesy of Little Lake Theatre
Trevor Buda rehearsing a scene in “The Metromaniacs,” at Little Lake Theatre through Sept. 11.
Courtesy of Little Lake Theatre
Amanda Weber (left) and Amy Dick in “The Metromaniacs.”
Courtesy of Little Lake Theatre
Brian Ferris, Keith Zagorski and Trevor Buda in Little Lake Theatre’s “The Metromaniacs” through Sept. 11.
If you could smash together Moliere and Mel Brooks, it might look something like “The Metromaniacs.”
A 2015 adaptation of an 18th-century French comedy “La Metromanie,” it gleefully blends together the contemporary and the not-so-contemporary — envision actors bedecked in costumes meant to summon up France in the days of Louis XV, with knee breeches and fitted bodices along with Converse sneakers.
Brooks and Madeline Kahn, an actor in a handful of the director’s films, “were an inspiration for me,” according to Sadie Crow, the director of Little Lake Theatre’s staging of “The Metromaniacs.” “It’s an interesting mix of a period piece and the totally modern.”
A Pittsburgh-area premiere, “The Metromaniacs” opened at Little Lake in North Strabane on Thursday night and will be there this weekend and next. It’s a Pittsburgh-area premiere, and an adaptation by playwright, novelist and author David Ives, who also reworked three other musty French verse plays before trying his hand with “The Metromaniacs.” Ives calls them “transladaptations,” combining “translation” and “adaptation.”
“The Metromaniacs” was first staged by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Michael Kahn, the company’s artistic director and director of the maiden production, explained in an interview, “It’s a lovely romantic satire. Like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, it’s about confused identity: a group of people who are addicted to poetry…fall in and out of love. The play is like a hall of mirrors. … There’s a sense of chaos to the play that (Ives) finds very amusing, as do I.”
When “The Metromaniacs” debuted Off-Broadway in 2018, New York Times theater critic Jesse Green wrote that it “squeezes contemporary English into pentameter couplets — and a story that, while still too complex to summarize, doesn’t matter. Even after seeing it and reading it, I can’t say I am sure what happens, except that it involves the gender-switching poet character, here called Francalou (rhymes with “rankle you”), and his verse-besotted daughter, her soubrette of a maid, two dashing suitors, a randy servant and a blustery uncle. They all meet in Francalou’s Paris ballroom, where he is staging his own play about the very same septet.”
Last year, Crow directed Little Lake’s production of “And Then There Were None” and has acted in several of the company’s productions. By day, Crow is the marketing development director for the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra in West Virginia, and explained that when it comes to directing, she likes “being the person who helps to make everything come together.”
Showtimes for “The Metromaniacs” are 2 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, Friday, Sept. 9, and Saturday, Sept. 10; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 11.
Additional information is available at littlelake.org.