Wooster

So, today Janice and I went with friends Jeff and Kate to see JEEVES TAKES A BOW at the Taproot theatre. I'm a big admirer of P. G. Wodehouse and have read all his Bertie and Jeeves novels, as well as all the short story collections (written over a sixty-year period --something of a record for the same author with the same pair of characters). I've even read the one book that features Jeeves  without Bertie; there's a book with Bertie without Jeeves but I've never been able to find that one.

This play did not adapt any of the Wodehouse books but spun up its own story out of Wodehousian characters and motifs. These bits and pieces make good use of the era's Art Deco setting to form a screwball comedy. I'd prefer to see one of P.G.W.'s masterpieces adapted, but if you like this kind of thing --and I confess I do -- then it's well worth seeing.  

Certainly it captures the spirit of Wodehouse better than does the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which gets the main character wrong (Webber portrays Bertie as surly when he shd be at most a bit querulous --and under considerable provocation, I might add). They did get the other main character, Jeeves, right.

So, while I enjoyed seeing it live, the best performance of the stories I've seen are the Hugh Laurie / Stephen Frye adaptations from the early nineties. 

Or, better yet, I cd re-read the books.

--John R.

--current reading: MONSTER (just finished), YELLOWFACE (just started)