Upcoming: The Imaginary Invalid, City Theatre, July 21 - August 14

Found on-line:

presents

The Imaginary Invalid

by Molière

directed by Karen Sneed

July 21 - August 14
Thursday – Saturday 8:00 p.m. Sunday 5:30 p.m.
The City Theatre. 3823 Airport Blvd, behind the Shell station (click for map)
Tickets $15 - $20. Guaranteed Front/2nd Row Reserved $25.
Students $12. Thursday all seats $10. Group discounts are available.
Reservations 512-524-2870 or info@citytheatreaustin.org

Quick-tongued, lively, fast-paced Moliere at his best. A merry-go-round of misplaced desires and hidden agendas in this fresh new take on skewering of the health care crisis. In this hilarious satire on the world of medicine the the wealthy, yet housebound hypochondriac Argan has every disease in the book and will go to any length to marry his daughter off to a doctor, Of course, she has other ideas. Lurking around are quacks only too happy to (mis)treat him, a money-grubbing wife and servants longing to carry on his miseries. A narcotic cocktail of romantic triangles, double entendres and mistaken identities ensues, promising to leave you gasping, giggling and possibly…in stitches.

Directed by Karen Sneed and featuring Richard Craig,Suzanne Balling, Alexandra Russo, Mick D’Arcy, Laura Cannon, Scot Friedman, Kirk Kelso, Cason Longley, Mario Silva, Kate Clark, Robert Frazier, Brian Brown, Ariel Atlas, Danielle Ruth, Elena Weinberg and Jessica Smith

The Imaginary Invalid by Molière and David Chambers, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, September 16 - 26

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin would not have objected at all to this re-do of his 1673 farce. He wrote The Imaginary Invalid in rapid-fire prose, using verse only for comic ballets at the intervals (omitted in this staging). David Chambers' translation/interpretation of the piece follows the action faithfully, although often with slangy word choices. Between them, Chambers and director David Long apply a clownification of the characters and a Borscht Belt leer not obvious in the original texts.

David Long has a good time, sending the characters zinging along. Some of his direction recalled those presentational techniques he used last year for bobrauschenbergamerica -- marking soliloquies and the young lovers' mock operetta with rapid, showy shifts of lighting, for example.

Argan, the title character played with fine finicky flair by veteran actor Richard Robichaux, is a rich hypochondriac with two daughters. Their mother passed away and Argan remarried -- to an effusive gold digger determined to persuade him to deed his property to her. Chambers renders this character -- Béline in the original -- as "Nastya," played by the charming Jill Blackwood with a patently fake Russian accent. Argan is determined to marry off his elder daughter Angelina (Michelle Elisabeth Brandt) to a physician so that he'll have free medical care, but she has already fallen in love with another (Cléanthe, played by Jon Wayne Martin).

Robichaux has lots of grumpy one-liners, mostly insults. His perpetual antagonist is Toinette, the servant, but he also gets into it with physician Thomas Diablo (Robert Faires), with Cléanthe, and with his brother (also played by Faires). In contrast and to our great amusement, the hypochondriac goes all goo-goo eyes with wife Nastya and gets entirely panicked by the rages of his principal physician Dr. Defecato (Meredith Montgomery).

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . .