Thespians ham it up '20s style at Varscona

“It’s a good thing for the embassy to have an ambassador in it.”

That’s what Dragomir Porporotz (Julien Arnold), the attachĂ© in the tiny and imaginary Balkan country of Panonia, states in the first few minutes of The Ambassador’s Wives, the sexy farce-cum-murder-mystery now playing at the Varscona Theatre.

He says this to Canadian refugee Teddie Warfield (St. Albert talent Jenny McKillop) but he’s really fooling himself. All I could think was to respond, “Or is it?” In Stewart Lemoine’s new play, it seems like this ambassador is nothing but trouble. All he does is travel across Europe and marry every rich woman he comes across.

But his selfish motives have an altruistic end: he’s only trying to build up his troubled country’s bankrupt federal reserves. If the dirty, rotten scoundrel doesn’t successfully bring in foreign investments in this manner, then he is at least the Donald Trump of attracting tourists. All of his new wives land at the embassy looking for him, eager to continue the honeymoon. What they end up with is a kind of Three Stooges routine with the polygamist husband going in and out doors and rooms, romancing and lying to each wife in turn without the others noticing. And then, of course, the cat gets out of the bag, right before one of the new brides falls down dead. That’s when this whole discombobulated mess turns into an Agatha Christie whodunit, but keeping the frothy Lemoine language intact.

This was a very enjoyable night on the town, one of those light but not inane frolics into the world of theatre. It might not have been much for set design, and it did go on a bit longer than it should have but the script was impeccable, the pacing superb and everything else (acting and costumes included) was spot on.

It’s set in the 1920s (in Panonia’s embassy in Monte Carlo) so expect the same kind of affectations and affected voices. One character, a famous dancer, had eyes that looked just like Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard but behaved just like a twin for Dianne Wiest’s Helen Sinclair in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. She even seemed to keep saying, “Don’t speak. Don’t speak,” even though I don’t think that was her exact line. I probably imagined it.

McKillop was fantastically exuberant as the wide-eyed and seemingly naïve Warfield. This was her first outing with the Teatro la Quindicina company and she was a shining beacon of energy amid a vast sea of immense talent.

Another St. Albert vet on the stage was Kate Ryan as the attachĂ©’s wife, Louisa, one of the madcap story’s stabilizing influences. Frankly, every part was played with verve and vivacity and I can’t help but also mention Davina Stewart’s dancer and Vincent Forcier as Bodo Puzo, a smarmy tag-along to the soon-to-be-deceased Ilona Stankar (Cathy Derkach).

Plus, Dana Andersen’s venerable yet extremely aged General Zraz has the fewest number of words to speak yet gets the lion’s share of mileage out of them. When he had to carry Warfield’s numerous suitcases filled with recently inherited millions, the audience felt his tired bones struggle with the weight. I’m not sure if it was simply the physical struggle that got to him or the exasperation of being stuck in the middle of an embassy of fools and duty-bound to stay there.