If "Richard III" demonstrates the general strengths of Antoni Cimolino's directorial skill (and by extension his larger vision for the festival as Artistic Director), "The Miser" finds him at his worst. In this update of Moliere's farce (adapted/translated by Ranjit Bolt), we witness wacky antics in the household of Harper (Colm Feore), the titular miser whose tight-fisted nature causes his son Charlie (Qasim Khan) and daughter Eleanor (Alexandra Lainfiesta) to rebel and seek love in unmonied places. This places them under threat of losing their trust-fund inheritance. Eleanor loves Victor (Jamie Mac), Harper's yes-man butler, and Charlie loves the humble Marianne (Beck Lloyd), but for various reasons Marianne is about to be engaged to none other than the aging Harper, throwing a wrench in Charlie's quest for both love and money.
All is wrapped up happily in Moliere's comedy, and where the laughs are genuine in Cimolino's production, they come from the soap-operatics that ensue when a highly improbable case of mistaken identity is revealed to ludicrous effect. Not unlike the King's messenger appearing at the end of "Tartuffe," sometimes Moliere reveled in a deus-ex-machina so bad you simply gotta respect it. Other than that, the jokes here are pretty tortured. Much is made of updating the text to include references to Jeff Bezos, Ryan Reynolds, Brangelina, and most egregiously, varying social media apps and Millennial/Gen Z vocabulary. The result is not a funky-fresh spruce-up but instead a pained example of the most embarrassing style of Boomer condescension; the references feel like the theatrical equivalent of your dad embarrassing you.
The actors did not seem wholly at home in the play in the final preview I saw. Their relationship to the story's characters and humor feels perfunctory, not lived-in. While the text (especially as adapted) is no example of high comedy, even the cheap laughs the show received from its audience felt obliging, rather than earned. Particularly with a post-Trump theatre audience, it's rare to blatantly ask for a laugh or cheer and not get one. So much did that man wreck our international psyche, he even made theatre audiences dumber (and I know I'm not excluded from this).
In genres other than blank verse drama, particularly comedy, Cimolino's sensibility feels chaste and painfully innocent. All the bits of business clearly staged to garner laughs feel manufactured and inorganic. What good is a crowd-pleaser if it feels like the director thinks he's doing the audience a favor? At best "The Miser'' elicits laughs that can be found elsewhere, and at worst inspires contempt for its elderly cribbing of youthful slang. Maybe the text isn't quite the comedic perfection of "Tartuffe," but surely there's more real fun to be had.
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