Stage

The title piece is also excellent -- a wordless pantomime about a sneeze during a ballet and its consequences. Paul Smith and Jennifer Davis enter as an eminent Russian official and his wife, dressed respectively in epaulets and a burgundy gown. Behind them sit a brown-coated fop of a minor official (Jeremy Koerner) and his appalling, overdressed wife (Hepps). This piece doesn't "belong" to anybody; all the actors do a good job. It's like a Chaplin film, vaudeville timed to lulls and climaxes in music from The Nutcracker.

Koerner and Davis have their own spotlight moment in "The Proposal," in which Koerner plays a nervous hypochondriac trying to propose to Natalya, a plain neighbor girl -- the hypochondriac hops around like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, without ever coming to the point, and Natalya gives two loud, floor-tramping tantrums -- but since it's a long skit, coming after the indulgent "Swan Song" to close out the show, their performances pale. It's too bad, because I like Davis; she shows real range and charm. The People's Republic should have shaved away the weaker pieces and maybe rearranged the order, because there isn't anything inspired about the way Michael Frayn has collected the skits. The show is like a museum exhibit passing through town -- old, historically interesting nuggets of a great Rhooshun's incidental work, sometimes hilarious but also a little wearing, and only for a limited time.

-- Michael Scott Moore