BWW Reviews: MARRIAGE GO ROUND Brings Laughs And Swedish Bombshells at Rainbow Dinner Theatre

Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert, and Julie Newmar: if that's not a cast worth remembering, nothing is. And that was the cast that made Leslie Stevens' 1958 play THE MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND a hit and then a popular film - the other two parts were recast (though James Mason and Susan Hayward are hardly shabby), but it made Julie Newmar a recognizable, sex-symbol star. Stevens, also responsible for the play THE LOVERS (possibly better known as the not-so-eponymously titled movie starring Charlton Heston and Rosemary Forsyth, THE WAR LORD) and for producing THE OUTER LIMITS - which he created - and the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, wrote as well again, but never as amusingly.

Rainbow Dinner Theatre is showing it now, having sensibly dropped the "The", and MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND proves to be as funny as ever. Directors David and Cynthia DiSavino have also sensibly updated it slightly, moving from trains to planes and from telephones to cell phones and texts, and - it matters not, really - moving it from the East Coast to California, the leads now being two UCLA professors rather than a professor and the Dean of Women (there used to be such a position, yes) at a college in New York. Although the play could be done as written by Stevens, as a period piece, with finely-handled updating it shows up well as a modern play, which only proves that marriage hasn't changed much in the past 50 years.

One of those things that hasn't changed is that, by and large, we're still a monogamous sort of country, and most happily monogamous spouses don't really want to cheat. They might look, and their brains may travel a lot of places, but the rest of the body stays home. And that's why MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND works - it's based on the recognition that a lot of things that sound like fun are immediately recognizable as bad ideas, and that spouses probably just shouldn't do them.

Even when the bad idea is a tall Swedish Amazon with an artist's model for a mother and a Nobel Prize winner for a father. Julie Newmar, the Bad Idea in the original show, is here played by tall, leggy, brunette Bad Idea, Liz Bachman, as Katrin Sveg, the Swedish Amazon. A Rainbow veteran of seasons past, she's also a veteran of the national tours of ANNIE and of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, and her theatrical credentials, as well as her figure, show up very well indeed. Bless her, as well, for hanging on to a clear Northern European accent all the way through the show.

Jim Ludovici, Philadelphia-area theatre veteran, plays Paul Delville, multiple-degreed, Fellow of the Royal Society, anthropology professor at UCLA, a happily married, comfortably middle-aged, sort of man. A long-missed Swedish colleague has sent his daughter to visit, but the gangly creature with pigtails and braces no longer has braces... or pigtails... or gawkiness. She's sex on a stick, with an IQ and measurements of equally great degree, and she's happy to announce that her biological clock is ticking loudly. She needs to have a child now - and since her father thinks that Paul is a great genius, he's likely the only man who qualifies for the description of sperm donor. These days that might not be an eyebrow raiser, but for the fact that she's concluded that the only way to do it is, ahem, the old-fashioned way, omitting modern assisted reproductive technology. (That's a neat twist that updating the show provides - that wasn't an option in 1958.) It sounds interesting, but Paul realizes that it's not a brilliant idea.

Agreeing that it's a bad idea is his wife, Content Deville, played by Rainbow veteran Casey Allyn, most recently seen in FUN BETWEEN THE COVERS. She's a psychologist, and is also a happily married, reasonably self-confident (and, as her name suggests, content) middle-aged woman. She sees Katrin as an annoyance, not a threat.

That's fine, until she discovers that Katrin's father's claimed appearance on the scene at any time - when Katrin will surely back down in her assault on Content's marriage - isn't about to happen, and that everyone's known it but her.

As with all of Rainbow's shows, the staging is lovely, veering between a UCLA lecture hall where each of the professor-spouses is lecturing a same-gender audience on marriage issues using this situation as an example, and the couple's living room. The lectures become interactive, as the professors take audience questions on the funnier side of minor marital problems such as refusal to ask for directions while driving, and the audience interaction is a very nice touch. (There's a free drink in it if your question about your partner is the one used in the "lecture".)

The cast is uniformly fine, but the standouts are really Allyn, who engages the audience as the long-suffering, understanding psychologist wife who's finally reached the limits of understanding and tolerance, and by Bradley "Bing" Ingersoll as UCLA linguistics professor Ross Barnett, who translates the Swedish text messages on Katrin's cell phone for Content and who serves as Content's best friend and sounding board on a regular basis - and, for all of his joking offers to her, still proves that a straight man can be a woman's best friend. Allyn and Ingersoll are both engaging and likeable, and make a real connection with the audience that Bachmann's part simply doesn't permit her to do: of all the parts, the Swedish bombshell's is the most stereotypical and two-dimensional, though Bachmann infuses Katrin with an energy and humor that keep her from risking audience boredom or annoyance with the character. Katrin, for all her theories and calculations, is very human and surprisingly innocent.

At Rainbow Dinner Theatre through August 4. Call 800-292-4301 or visit www.rainbowdinnertheatre.com for tickets.

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