Chamber Theatre's Charmed Wodehouse - Milwaukee Magazine

Milwaukee Magazine

CHAMBER THEATRE'S CHARMED WODEHOUSE

By Paul Kosidowski

In these days of comedy snark and short ideological fuses, P.G. Wodehouse is a welcome balm of wit and generosity. While his comic novels routinely explored the foibles of the British upper crust, the laughs were at no ones expense. We all have our Bertie Wooster days, after all. And we all pine for an aide de camp like Jeeves (be he friend, butler or superhero) to help us get out of life's sticky situations.

Even though television adaptations of his stories are the staples of late night PBS marathons, Wodehouse was a man of the page rather than the stage. So the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre required the services of an adaptor to bring Wodehouse's characters into the Cabot Theatre.  Jeeves Intervenes is playwright Margaret Raether's take on a few Jeeves stories, and it works fairly well, adding enough door-slamming farce to the mix (or appropriate to the genteel setting, door-sliding farce) to make it play in a big house like the Cabot.

Not surprising for even a genteel farce, there's matchmaking and masquerade afoot. Jeeves must find ways to keep Wooster out of a marriage proposed by his Aunt Agatha, and help his school chum Eustace, who is in danger of having his uncle's allowance cut off. As one of Wodehouse's posh creations might say, "entanglements ensue."

Chris Klopatek plays Wooster with a lightness worthy of his ivory flannels, and a physical energy that keeps things moving along. Matt Daniels is strong foil, implacable of course, but perhaps a bit too sing-songy in his delivery. (One of the drawbacks of the stage is the need to amplify Jeeves's trademark understated reactions to get them to the back rows.) As Wooster's school chum, Eustace, Rick Pendzich is appropriately wide-eyed and full of bluster. And as Gertrude, Wooster's intended match, Alison Mary Forbes is charming, but doesn't take the character into full middle-linebacker mode, which seems to be what Wodehouse intended.
It's the two veterans in the cast that show how it's really done. As Aunt Agatha, Laura Gordon is in full-Lady Bracknell mode, using her very presence to enforce English propriety with the authority of a dictator. And Peter Silbert, playing Eustace's uncle, Sir Rupert, is the embodiment of the old English warrior, war-medaled sash on his shoulder, standing up for King and country. He plays upper-class indignation like an expert cellist, swooping up into raised eyebrows and down into basso grunts. It isn't easy to live up to Wodehouse's outrageous character names. But Silbert is every inch a Sir Rupert Watlington Pipps.

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