STAGE REVIEW : SCR’s ‘School’ Scandalously Up to Date

Sheridan’s “School for Scandal� has been getting laughs for 200 years, and some of us have probably seen it 20 times. It would take a clever director to make us see it anew.

Any fool, of course, can dump a can of pink paint over a familiar play and cast it with dwarfs. Conversely, any time-beater could do a museum-theater “School for Scandal� with everyone in knee buckles.

The trick is to give us Sheridan’s play (not just the words) and yet take us by surprise. Easy to say, hard to do.

See Paul Marcus’ staging of “School for Scandal� at South Coast Repertory for one solution. If it’s outrageous--and it is--it is also absolutely in line with the intentions of the play. First, to get laughs. Second, to look at the tacky behavior of some privileged people who should know better.

Sheridan moved in the best circles of London society, and wasn’t too impressed by what passed for conversation therein, as we see from the names of his characters--Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite.

What if our playwright came to life today and were forced to attend a no-host cocktail party for, say, Joan Collins? That’s the notion behind Marcus’ production, yet not carried to the point of a humorless modern-dress production.

This “School for Scandal� happens--when? Quite possibly in 2001, where the notion of post-modernism has so taken root that everything that fashionable people say, do and wear is a quotation from an earlier period.

Late 18th Century is the vogue at the moment, amusingly mixed with touches from the high-trash 1980s. Lady Teazle (Caitlin O’Heaney), therefore, looks like something that Madonna’s cat dragged in, while Crabtree (Don Took) suggests Elvis on a posthumous tour.

Lady Sneerwell (Joan Stuart-Morris), on the other hand, wears an almost proper 18th-Century paneled ball gown--with the front panel missing, so that we can see her fuchsia Capri pants and white boots, from the ‘60s. Darling, how deliciously tacky!

Shigeru Yaji’s costumes are, in fact, so vulgar and yet so feasible that it wouldn’t be surprised to see some Paris designer knock them off for his next collection. Similarly, Cliff Faulkner’s settings combine Art Deco and 18th Century in a mix that could well be the next wave in home furnishings.

This is wickedly apt, as is the notion of having Crabtree trade give-me-fives with his foppish nephew (Mark Capri), although neither of them is black. The people in Lady Sneerwell’s world are always doing numbers on each other. Who they are when they close the door at night, nobody knows. Perhaps they disappear.

This comes close to the world of “Les Liasions Dangereuses,� especially when the petulant Stuart-Morris is colluding with the snakey Joseph Surface (Joe Spano, suggesting H.R. Haldeman in Little Lord Fauntleroy knee britches.)

But it doesn’t get too close. Though satirical, this isn’t the kind of dour, critical look at the play that Jonathan Miller gave us at the Doolittle in ’84. Sheridan’s good humor comes through. There’s even hope that Lady Teazle and her out-of-vogue husband (Ray Reinhardt) will actually stop fighting.

Similarly, there’s not a hint of the brute in Tom Harrison’s Charles Surface--he simply has some growing up to do. Perhaps he and his rock group will find a career, and stop being a garage band. (“Let the Toast Pass� has had many musical settings over the past 200 years, but never one this raucous--Richard Jennings was the composer.)

If this sounds like fun, it is. Director Marcus likes the play and doesn’t have to warp it to a personal agenda to make it apply to our world. Beyond that, he seems to have encouraged everybody involved to come up with ideas, and there are some wild interpolations.

Underneath this, though, there’s the beat of good, solid acting--as in Spano’s instant changes of false face in the famous screen scene; as in Dennis Robertson’s human portrayal of the sometimes wooden Sir Oliver Surface. Take away the bright ideas, and this would be a perfectly serviceable “School for Scandal.� But how nice to find those ideas.

Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30, with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Closes May 29. Tickets $18-$25. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 957-4033.