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Slideshow: The Slutcracker

Theater

Vintage mirth and vintage laughter

The actors, however, manage to meld Belle Époque elegance with comic outrage. Mark Harelik’s lanky, starchy Chandebise effortlessly morphs into a louche, easygoing Poche (in which guise he takes an Olympics-worthy third-act dive out his own window). Kathryn Meisle’s Raymonde and Mia Barron’s Lucienne prove splendid manikins for Gregory Gale’s rich, cinched turn-of-the-20th-century gowns. But whereas Meisle underplays deliciously, Barron, her knees shaking and her bare shoulders shimmering, stops the show with a breathless third-act account of “tumbling and tumbling” down the Frisky Puss stairs with the gauche Poche.

Brooks Ashmanskas supplies a characteristic touch of Nathan Lane, as well as a touch of Joe Orton, as the loopy, lascivious physician more interesting in playing than being doctor. As the speech-challenged Camille, whose conversation consists mostly of vowels (the result of “a congenital fault in the dental vault”), the wonderfully panic-prone yet tightly wound Carson Elrod manages the near-impossible task of being more or less understood. And as pistol-packing, language-mangling, green-eyed-monster-deployed Don Carlos Homenides de Histangua, whose name is flamboyantly gargled by all, David Pittu makes thespian hay of a raging cliché.

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