http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/Arts/content.html?oid=oid:24076 Very Good Eddie The Goodspeed Opera House's re-revival of the 1915 farce. by Joshua Mamis - July 10, 2003 DIANE SOBOLEWSKI PHOTO Time traveling: Eddie (Randy Rogel, center) finds his first mate in Very Good Eddie. Very old story. Very well told. Very well sung and danced. Very Goodspeed. That could well be the review of this 1915 chestnut after it officially opens at the appropriately Victorian Goodspeed Opera House, on the banks of the Connecticut--not the Hudson--River. It's the perfect setting for this manic mixed-up love story first produced in 1915--the tale of two mismatched couples (the two men former Yale roommates) getting separated from their spouses during their honeymoons on a cruise up the Hudson--not the Connecticut--River. It's vintage screwball stuff, with oddball characters (a Frenchman and a wisecracking porter/bellman/hotel clerk, an absent-minded opera teacher) keeping the fast-paced yucks flowing. The songs are of the period, with vintage, elegant and sometimes ragtimey melodies from the great Jerome Kern, and intricate and comic lyrics from Schuyler Greene. The cast at the Goodspeed revival includes the multi-talented Randy Rogel as Eddie Kettle. Among other credits, Rogel co-wrote and composed those wacky songs on Animaniacs. At rehearsals he displayed an appropriately nimble and classy dance pedigree. Percy Darling (yes, the name is the source for many jokes) will be played by Broadway and Off Broadway vet Patrick Boll, seen at Goodspeed shows By Jeeves and No, No, Nanette. The script for Very Good Eddie was updated and reworked by the Goodspeed in 1975 and went on to Broadway, so it isn't quite as dusty as it might have been. Still, the show is so old-fashioned it's tempting to wonder why someone with the modern-day pedigree of director BT McNicholl, a collaborator with Sam Mendes on Cabaret and with James Lapine on Stephen Sondheim's Passion, would be interested in this period work. "It's a charming piece," McNichol says, brightening, when asked while taking a break from a recent rehearsal. McNicholl, who also directed and wrote the lyrics for the recent The IT Girl, itself a throwback to old-school musicals, is playing Very Good Eddie straight--no winks, no we're-smarter-than-this-now-nods. "Our take is not to do a take on it," he says. Very Good Eddie is one of the Princess Theatre shows--a handful of early American musicals that were the first to integrate the songs with the show's plot and character. McNicholl is also attracted to the show because it provides relief from the cynicism of contemporary theater. "We live in a cynical world," he observes, "and ultimately that wears on us as a society." He imagines this production "as a time travel machine. We're deliberately restoring it to its original look. ... From the minute you walk into the space you will be transported, and the people on the stage will act as if they are from that time and place." Very Good Eddie appeared on stage before the U.S. entered World War I, he points out. The characters are unaware of the global conflict. "It's the last gasp of that kind of political naivete. There's something touching about seeing the world just before it got fractured." And something, he believes, redeeming about returning to it now.