Imaginary Invalid

Moon boots! ‘Fros! Bell-bottoms! Molière!

OSF premieres a new adaptation of the classic Imaginary Invalid that really got my groove and flipped my funk. Director Tracy Young was searching for a concept to slap onto the Molière’s play – something integrating “the populist aspects of commedia and the over-the-top gilding of the French Baroque.” She says she “landed” on French pop music from the sixties, but what she really did (she and her co-adaptor Oded Gross) was fly.

The set was clean – it set us in upper class Paris – but it did not prepare us for what happened at 8:30.

At 8:30 the ensemble came out dressed in some of the most fabulously flamboyant costumes I’ve seen at OSF (so a nod to costumer Christopher Acebo is in order). They sang and danced a lively little ditty by Oded, Tracy and Paul James Prendergast that got my feet tapping and me ready to see the show!

Now let’s get sober – this choice was a risk. Whenever a director decides that she needs to have a new setting for every classic play that comes her way, she’s in peril of making something slap-shod and boring. You can have all the eye- and ear-candy in the world and still have a bummer of a show. This Invalid is not stuck in that hospital bed. It wasn’t about taking two things that suggest each other to the director and putting them on stage together – it was hardly intellectual at all (and that’s a good thing – some of the worst plays I’ve seen were still stuck in somebody’s brain). It’s fun. The creative team had fun, the designers had fun, the performers had fun, and so we the audience had a grand old time.