Jeeves’ Final Bow?

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Photo Credit: Paul Ruffolo

The reversal of the servant-master relationship, with the former actually running the show, is a theme as old as ancient Greece. The best-known rendition of the comic archetype in the English-speaking world, P.G. Wodehouse’s spot-on team of Jeeves and Wooster, receives a new iteration in playwright Margaret Raether’s Jeeves Takes a Bow.

In the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s charming production, the third episode in Raether’s Wodehouse trilogy, Bertie Wooster (Chris Klopatek) and his man Jeeves (Matt Daniels) are ensconced in a splendid art deco hotel suite in New York. Even with an ocean separating him from home, Bertie can’t escape his proclivity for getting stuck in an English taffy of convoluted problems. His friend Binky (Chase Stoeger) turns up in Manhattan, impersonating Bertie for improbable reasons having to do with a dame, a bumptious Yank, Ruby (Anna Cline), whose father, Knuckles McCann (Steven M. Koehler), is a bootlegging gangster. The real Binky is in love with Ruby, but the real Bertie unwittingly becomes her fiancé—and also finds himself engaged to an English woman he had endeavored to avoid, Vivienne (Kay Allmand).

Tami Workentin directs the amusing farce efficiently, with short breaks between scenes that unfold on Rick Rasmussen’s gorgeous hotel sitting room set. The cast plays their roles broadly, with English tally-ho and pip-pip colliding with Guys and Dolls “swank joint ya got here” jive. Allmand gives a more closely modulated performance as the straight-laced Vivienne—until she goes native in the speakeasies of Prohibition New York.

The dialogue is one part witty, two parts silly, and pastes together a comical world where glamor reigns, money is no object and a faithful servant keeps a level head and unknots all of life’s tangles. Nice place if you can find it.

Through May 3 at the Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets call (414) 291-7800 or visit milwaukeechambertheatre.com.