Bubbling Bath Huntington puts a froth on The Rivals BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Rivals By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set by Alexander Dodge. Costumes by Michael Krass. Lighting by Dennis Parichy. Sound by Jerry Yager. With Dennis Staroselsky, Nathaniel McIntyre, Cheryl Lynn Bowers, Helen McElwain, Mia Barron, Mary Louise Wilson, Will LeBow, Scott Ferrara, Gareth Saxe, Brian Hutchison, Rod McLachlan, and Eric Anderson. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through February 6.

You might think it impossible to upstage Mrs. Malaprop, especially when that famed William F. Buckley wanna-be is played by the formidable Mary Louise Wilson in a foot-high wig of what looks like curled cotton candy. But in the sumptuously Day-Glo production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals that’s up on the Huntington Theatre Company stage, complete with Bath’s Royal Crescent and shimmering bottles of curative water, Wilson’s Malaprop is no rival for the snittily tyrannical Sir Anthony Absolute of Will LeBow. It’s the veteran American Repertory Theatre actor who walks off — at a jerky, deliberate, cane-stomping stride — with the Huntington show.

Written in 1775, when Sheridan was 23 (but had had his share of courtship strife, fighting several duels after spiriting off the Bath belle he married), The Rivals is a brilliant young man’s play, with little truck for its dictatorial dad or its language-mauling harridan out to thwart young love and war. Captain Jack Absolute, the privileged son of Sir Anthony, has disguised himself as a penniless naval ensign, Beverley, in order to court Mrs. Malaprop’s luscious niece, Lydia Languish, whose fantasy is to elope with an impoverished hunk. Bustling about the boîtes and byways of luxurious Georgian-era Bath, these characters, their servants, their friends, and, of course, their rivals are a retinue of bristling, sighing popinjays moved about the deep Huntington stage by director Nicholas Martin as if they were in a comic ballet, the action punctuated by bursts of Sir Thomas Beecham’s ballet-friendly transcription of Handel, Love in Bath.

Something of a prodigy, Sheridan knocked off The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and a couple of other plays in his 20s before spending more than 30 eloquent years in Parliament and dying broke. If he were writing today, he’d probably still be filling out grad-school applications and trying to get the attention of Paula Vogel or Kate Snodgrass. Instead, in the 1770s, he was scraping the vulgarity off Restoration comedy, sluicing it with sentiment, and making it acceptable to the Georgian palate. He also created, in The Rivals, a bewigged and corseted linguistic buffoon whose very name has become part of the lexicon. Mrs. Malaprop, affected but addled, never met a big word she didn’t like — or misuse. (Hence, a flattering Jack Absolute is "the very pineapple of politeness.") And Wilson plays her like a slightly dizzy gorgon, imperious and squawky but, in her romantic humiliation by duel-happy Sir Lucius O’Trigger, not unsympathetic. If only she were a little more flamboyant; some of her malapropisms get lost in the front rows. LeBow’s wiry Sir Anthony, by contrast, is a sublime cartoon. All basso bark and little St. Vitus’ dances of vexation, he is roused by his son’s inamorata to enthused paroxysms of lasciviousness-by-proxy, and, when not peeved, he’s possessed of a frisky bonhomie that bears out his claim that "I am compliance itself — when I am not thwarted."

All is swashbuckle and simper among the comedy’s younger denizens, with Cheryl Lynn Bowers’s Lydia a squeaky blonde kewpie in a pink balloon negligee and Scott Ferrara’s Jack miles of leg and dash. As the play’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek figure (and rival suitor to Lydia), "country gentleman" Bob Acres, Brian Hutchison manages both virility and idiocy; he’s a buckskinned enthusiast self-"polished" into a fop in a Howdy-Doody-as-conehead wig trying to weasel out of a duel for which hilt-happy Sir Lucius has pumped him up like a bellows. Mia Barron introduces a charming note of sincerity into the prevailing capriciousness as Julia Melville, whose commitment to Jack’s friend Faulkland is worn thin by her depressive swain’s addiction to "fretfulness and whim." As Faulkland, Gareth Saxe is a comic snarl of lover’s suspicion and hangdog panache. And as richly costumed by Michael Krass, all of the characters — in vivid ensembles of pink and yellow and turquoise and orange — look as if done up in 18th-century haute couture by Crayola.

The Rivals is 229-year-old nonsense, of course, peopled by exaggerated characters given Jonsonian monikers to denote their humors and filled with the overwrought romantic intrigue and featherweight quarrels that were a trademark of the time. But the comedy is elegantly written and clever, and on the Huntington stage, under Martin’s near-operatic direction, it floats brightly on set designer Alexander Dodge’s sepia crescent, out of which pop busy residential boxes ironically fitted out with masculine telescopes or gilded cages. Most irresistible, though, in this incarnation of The Rivals is its act of Will.