Photo of Theatre de l’Atelier’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, presented at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo by Gaspard Leclerc.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is in a limited run at Shakespeare Theater Company’s Lansburgh Theater – just five more performances after last night’s opening. One tonight, two each on Saturday and Sunday. It’s an import from Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris, where it was directed by John Malkovitch… whose breakout role was as the lead opposite Glenn Close in the 1988 Hollywood movie. Unlike that version, this one is entirely in French and subtitled. Or super-titled, rather, since the captions are projected onto a spot above the stage.

It makes for a challenge if you’re not a fluent French speaker, and my wife mentioned what might be the most valuable thing I can impart to you if you’re going: wear your contacts. In your glasses you’ll have to move your head up and down to follow both the action and the text, rather than just moving your eyes.

In the interest of putting this review out in time for it to do you any good, I’ll be brief. [cue sighs of relief everywhere] The show is an imperfect but highly entertaining staging of the story. Some of the flaws are structural, others might be simply a matter of watching a captioned work.

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Courtesy of David Willis and the excellent webcomic Shortpacked!

Now that scene above, Molly Smith, would represent “a completely fresh interpretation” of the 50 year old musical.

What we really get, press releases to the contrary, is the same old My Fair Lady we’re all familiar with – a story of a poor, uneducated girl who is transformed by the teaching of an older man into someone who can pass in upper-crust society. Once her Stockholm Syndrome has fully settled in she finds herself in love. Arena’s take is attractive and consistent, minus two odd transgressions, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. If that’s what you want, great – here you go. It’s the perfect production to take your parents to while they’re visiting over the holidays and it’s a lovely night out in the theater.

The high points are certainly Nicholas Rodriguez as Freddie, the inexplicably passed-over suitor, and the staging and choreography. The low point would be the lack of attention paid to the last fifty years of feminism and any sense of why Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle would come together in the end in a romantic relationship. Some of that is where we are as a society compared to when the orignal was penned, but some of the blame has to fall on the directoral decisions and how Benedict Campbell portrays Higgins as not just absent-minded and detached but as somewhat spitefully mean.

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