Review: "The Metromaniacs" (Shakespeare Theatre Company)

[cinaed]

 So I saw The Metromaniacs last week! 

Verdict: I really loved it.

Longer verdict: David Ives, who adapted the play from its original French, does some interesting things with language and rhyming— he modernizes the language as well as has the play in rhymed verse, which took me a few minutes to adjust to, but felt clever rather than trite. 

The play is funny. It manages to feel a bit like Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, with countless sex jokes, multiple ridiculous romantic entanglements, and each character juggling at least two (and sometimes three) identities. Plus lots and lots of poking fun at writers, both excellent writers and terrible ones.

Also you can’t go wrong when the play is making fun of Voltaire for falling for a scam artist, because Alexis Piron was a troll who thought the whole thing was hilarious. 
 

“[The Metromaniacs] was a lip-smacking scandal in its time, spinning into art what had been real-life comedy. It seems all Paris had fallen in love with the poems of Mademoiselle Malcrais de La Vigne, a mysterious poetess from distant Brittany (read: Appalachia). The celebrated satirist Voltaire publicly declared his love for the lady and her great works, only to have it revealed that Mlle de La Vigne was a guy named Paul Desforges-Maillard, very much living in Paris and taking his revenge on the poetry establishment for not appreciating his genius. Needless to say, Voltaire wasn’t pleased when Piron’s satire showed up (and showed him up). Worse than that, the show was a hit.”

—	The story behind Alexis Piron’s The Metromaniacs, from David Ives’s “Metromania Mania.”