E-Mail This Article to a Friend Play mates The Game and Peter Pan in the Berkshires BY STEVE VINEBERG
	The Game Book and lyrics by Amy Powers and David Topchik. Based on Les liaisons dangereuses, by Pierre-Ambrose-François Choderlos de Laclos. Music by Megan Cavallari. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Choreography by Jan Leys. Musical direction by Michael Morris. Set by Michael Anania. Costumes by Fabio Toblini. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Sound by Randy Hansen. With Sara Ramirez, Christopher Innvar, Heather Ayers, Cristin Boyle, Greg Mills, Joy Franz, and Griffin Gardner. At Barrington Stage Company, Sheffield, through August 23. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up By James M. Barrie. New version by John Caird and Trevor Nunn. Directed by Eric Hill. Set by Tim Saternow. Costumes by Olivera Gajic. Lighting by Dan Kotlowitz. With Isadora Wolfe, Walter Hudson, Bill Bowers, Tara Franklin, Kate Maguire, James Barry, and Justina Trova. At Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through August 30.

Both The Game at Barrington Stage Company and the new Peter Pan by John Caird and Trevor Nunn at Berkshire Theatre Festival revisit familiar — and beloved — material. Peter Pan is, of course, James Barrie’s children’s classic, which Americans know best through its musical versions: the Walt Disney animation and the adaptation that, on Broadway and then on television, presented Mary Martin with her signature role. In their 1982 adaptation, Caird and Nunn recycle Barrie’s original script (he invented it in fairly lengthy dramatic form), cutting some episodes and adding a narrator. The Game is a musical derived from Les liaisons dangereuses, the stinging, brilliant 1782 novel by Pierre-Ambrose-François Choderlos de Laclos that has previously come to theatergoers through the Christopher Hampton play and to moviegoers through marvelous (and distinctive) versions by Roger Vadim and Stephen Frears — and a third one, best forgotten, by Milos Forman.

The Game presents Choderlos de Laclos’s intricate plot without alteration. The protagonists, once again, are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, a pair of reprobates — and sometime lovers — who use the innocents around them as pawns in sexual power games to amuse themselves and get at each other. (Choderlos de Laclos’s understanding of sexual politics is two centuries ahead of Michel Foucault and feminist theory.) Behind a veil of respectability, the widowed Merteuil plots the deflowering of her convent-bred cousin Cécile de Volanges as revenge against the wealthy man Cécile is set to wed. Her chosen seducer is none other than Valmont, who schemes simultaneously to dissolve the virtue of the pious Madame de Tourvel, a challenge he considers far worthier of his intellect and ingenuity. Cécile has fallen meanwhile for her young music teacher, the callow Chevalier Danceny. Merteuil takes Danceny into her own bed while she and Valmont pretend to serve as aides to the young couple’s clandestine romance.

The musical is intelligent and adult; it isn’t, however, the real thing. The story may be present in all its bitter, fiery glory, but the writing (by Amy Powers and David Topchik) is heavy-handed. If you’ve seen the Frears film, you may cherish the scene where John Malkovich’s Valmont, who has astonished himself by falling in love with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Tourvel, tosses her away despite his better instincts to please Merteuil (Glenn Close), and the brittle high comedy is transformed into tragedy. There isn’t much comedy in The Game — Cristin Boyle supplies almost all of it as Cécile, whose inexperience borders on imbecility — and so you’re cheated out of the deepening of emotions. Instead the material plays like a melodrama, with Merteuil and Valmont as the villains. As Valmont, Christopher Innvar has a wonderful moment when he realizes his feelings for Tourvel at the same time that Merteuil does. But though he gives a highly competent performance, that’s the only surprise in it.

The score has so many songs that the second act especially feels like an operetta, yet most of Megan Cavallari’s music isn’t memorable, though it contains some pretty harmonies in the group numbers. Sara Ramirez, who gives a glittering, accomplished performance as Merteuil, makes the most of her songs, especially the first-act finale, "Wanting Her More," which is the best melody in the score and the show’s dramatic highlight. In any case, the real problem isn’t the music, which does its job, but the lyrics. Powers and Topchik are often clever, as in "They’re Only Men," where Merteuil tutors Cécile, and "Certain Women," a Sondheim-esque epistolary duet between Merteuil and Valmont’s compassionate aunt, Madame de Rosemonde (very well played by Joy Franz). Yet either the pair’s vision of the characters isn’t sufficiently complex or they lack the originality to express it in their lyrics, which reduce the subtleties of emotion and motivation you find in Choderlos de Laclos (and in Frears) to Broadway banalities.

This reductiveness diminishes the possibilities for an obviously talented cast, all of whom can both act and sing. Heather Ayers conveys both Tourvel’s fidelity (to both her husband and her Catholicism) and her passion (when she can no longer keep from responding to Valmont’s advances). But her big number, "My Sin," is devoid of nuance in the writing, so though she performs it skillfully, it comes across as an overwrought diva turn.

The director, Julianne Boyd (who is Barrington Stage Company’s artistic director), gives the production a shimmering finish. The gowns Fabio Toblini has designed for the women puzzled me: often quite elaborate below the waist, above they’re merely corset bodices with sleeves attached. The choice is such a strange one that I presume there has to be a conceptual purpose behind it — a comment on the tension between the mannerist surface and the sexual being underneath? That contradiction wouldn’t apply, however, to all the characters (Griffin Gardner’s Madame de Volanges, for example, views sex as an unpleasant wifely duty), and there’s no corresponding treatment of Valmont or of Greg Mills’s Danceny. Michael Anania’s suggested-realist set and Jeff Croiter’s lighting are more effective.

The problems in The Game are mostly in the play itself; I was never in doubt that I was watching professionals doing their best to put across a new piece. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Peter Pan, which, it’s safe to say, doesn’t get one single thing right. Whatever one’s qualms may be about the Barrie play, there’s a way to make a virtue of its Georgian archness and sugared-milk quality by delicately underscoring its old-fashioned nursery style and finding a pleasing candied visual style. An ingenious director and designer might even get around the added clunkiness of the narration in the Caird-Nunn adaptation. What you can’t do is to play the story as if an audience of children meant an audience of morons. It’s incomprehensible that, in 2003, a professional theater company could throw together a children’s play as if the most basic virtues of good theater didn’t matter in this genre. In an ensemble of 23, not a single performer is ashamed to overenunciate, pull broad, terrible faces, and camp it up for dumb laughs. Most egregious are Bill Bowers, who mimes Tinker Bell as well as serving as narrator, and Walter Hudson, doubling as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling. And every routine is repeated ad nauseam; I think I might have groaned aloud the fifth time the half-dozen lost boys answered a question in assembly-line fashion.

Since chances are that some of the actors have performed adequately in other circumstances (more than half of them are Equity), it’s appropriate to lay the blame on the director. Eric Hill compounds the abominable acting by presenting the production without regard for æsthetics or even common sense. I’ve seen summer-camp productions that were staged more competently, so that the actors didn’t look as if they were in danger of shoving one another into the wings. The movement work would be subpar in an introductory acting class: every time Isadora Wolfe, as Peter, leaps down off a window sill or onto the deck of Hook’s ship, she lands with a small crash. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to Hill to choreograph the group scenes (or find someone who could), let alone find a visual style for the show. Tim Saternow’s sets are tossed together, and the costume designer, Olivera Gajic, offers up a mishmash of ideas, from primitive African masks for the Indians (which aren’t bad) and a Lion King hand-me-down for the wolf pack (which is a good idea, even if it’s someone else’s) to a Gay ’90s gown for the crocodile (which looks idiotic). As for the Lost Boys’ outfits, particularly their headgear, it’s one thing to suggest a child’s vision and quite another to make outfits that look as if a 10-year-old had actually designed them.

The Saturday-matinee audience with whom I saw the show, mostly young children and their desperate parents, kept up a steady backdrop of noise that only occasionally reflected what was happening on the stage. Given the stultifying nature of this Peter Pan, the kids’ behavior seemed to me entirely justified.