✭✭✭✭✩

music & lyrics by David Yazbek, book by Jeffrey Lane, directed by Tracey Flye

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

May 29-November 23, 2025

Lawrence: “Give them what they want”

If you’re looking for 2½ hours of escapist entertainment at the Stratford Festival, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels will fit the bill. The 2004 musical by David Yazbek is based on the movie of the same name from 1988 even though it feels like a throwback to the farce-plotted musicals of the 1930s. While Yazbek’s music covers wide range of styles, his lyrics are especially clever and recall the days of Noël Coward and Cole Porter.

The action is set in Beaumont-sur-Mer, a fictional town on the French Riviera, sometime in the early 1980s before personal computers and mobile phones. We meet the wealthy conman Lawrence Jameson who has plied his trade on this part of the coast for years. He masquerades as the exiled prince of a small country who is seeking to finance the country’s freedom fighters. To this end he chooses rich foreign women as his targets and woos them while persuading them to aid his cause with their money, jewelry or both.

Lawrence’s bodyguard, the corrupt policeman Andre, warns Lawrence that a criminal known as The Jackal is known to be heading to the Riviera. When Lawrence notices a young American, Freddy Benson, con a woman on the train, he assumes that this is The Jackal and brings him home to his mansion to keep an eye on him.

Freddy does have a use. It happens that Lawrence is entangled with an oil heiress, Jolene Oakes, who expects Lawrence to keep his promise to marry her and move with her back to Oklahoma. To out of this fix, Lawrence has Freddy play his grotesque brother Ruprecht, whom Lawrence says will have to live with him and Jolene since Ruprecht has no one else.

With Jolene suitably scared off, the two both set their sights on a young woman, Christine Colgate, known as “The American Soap Queen”. The two make a deal that the first to bilk her of $50,000 wins and the other will have to leave town. The back-and-forth of this competition makes up the bulk of the musical. At one point Freddy plays the role of a military man with psychosomatic paralysis of the legs and Lawrence plays the role of Dr. Shuffhausen, the Austrian world expert on such situations.

The plot moves through so many twists and turns, the show seems to end about three times before it is over. While Yazbek’s lyrics are far wittier than those in most new musicals, his music is less easy to define. This is because he focusses so intently giving each character a particular musical style. For Lawrence the elegant roué, Yazbek writes songs in imitation of Coward and Porter. For the younger, more up-to-date Freddy, the songs are influenced by early hip-hop. When Jolene sings about taking Lawrence back to Oklahoma, the music switches into a country western parody of the musical Oklahoma! called “Oklahoma?” When Lawrence impersonates an Austrian doctor, his songs acquire an oom-pah rhythm. The brash American Christine enters to a brash American entry song. And Muriel Eubanks, one of Lawrence’s still devoted conquests, sings accordion-accompanied songs in the style of French chansons. Yazbek even conceives a big dance number like “The More We Dance” as a Latin dance music despite the show’s setting in France. Even if Yazbek’s music never equals that of his models, all his parodies of different styles makes his music often as amusing as his lyrics.

The frankly silly plot only works if it serves to generate a series of outstanding performances. This is does with many of the cast finally having the chance to give prominence to previously hidden sides of their talent. Jonathan Goad has played a conman before, namely as Harold Hill in Stratford’s The Music Man in 2008. Here as Lawrence Jameson he tries on a the very different persona of the smooth, elegant British-accented rogue. He pulls this off superbly with spot-on comic timing and precisely enunciated diseur delivery of Yazbek’s faux Noël Coward songs as in “Give Them What They Want” and does his best Rex Harrison imitation for the Lerner-and-Loewe-like “Love Sneaks In”. When Lawrence takes on the disguise of Viennese Dr. Shuffhausen, Goad resists the temptation to overdo the German accent and finds comedy in how the doctor acts rather than how he speaks.

Liam Tobin is a constant delight as Freddy Benson. Anyone lucky enough to have seen Tobin as Buddy the Grand Theatre London’s production of Elf in 2013 will know that Tobin has a knack for wacky physical comedy. That is just what the role of Freddy requires plus a fun mix of naïveté and bravado. It’s rather too bad that Yazbek gives Freddy rap-influenced songs because they don’t really allow Tobin to show off his fine, strong voice. Seldom does he have the chance to hold a note, but when he does you wish the score would let him do so more often.

Of the shows three major roles, the one disappointment is Shakura Dickson as “The American Soap Queen” Christine Colgate, the object of Freddy and Lawrence’s wager. Dickson has a strikingly effervescent stage presence, but her voice, whether speaking or singing, can become unpleasantly piercing when in a higher register or when placed under too much pressure. That means that her big entrance song “Here I Am” set in her upper register does not create the positive impression it should. We have to wait for her duet with Freddy, “Nothing is Too Wonderful to Be True”, to discover that her voice in its lower register is quite attractive.

The cast member who makes the most positive impression is Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Muriel Eubanks, the middle-aged woman who is Lawrence’s most devoted follower. Hosie is the one who gets the satirical/nostalgic tone of the show exactly right. Hosie has played the villain in five Ross Petty pantos (e.g., The Wizard of Oz in 2018) and is so far the only actor who has been able to match Petty in that role. Here Hosie demonstrates that she can mix comedy with sentiment, making Muriel the most sympathetic character in the show. Hosie has a wonderfully warm, clear singing voice which allows her to bring out both the comedy and the emotion in a song like “What Was a Woman To Do”.

Previously, I had only seen Derek Kwan previously in serious roles, as in the operas Mr. Shi and His Lover (2017) or The Lesson of Da Ji (2013). What a pleasure then to find that Kwan has a fine sense of comedy and can calibrate his tenor to sing music theatre. Kwan plays Lawrence’s all-knowing butler/bodyguard Andre, whose life takes a surprising turn when he takes on a new assignment.

Among the minor characters, Michelle Shuster is very funny as the brash American oil heiress Jolene Oakes, who is ready to force Lawrence at gunpoint to marry her. Shuster’s big, ringing voice is perfectly suited to her overbearing character in her one number “Oklahoma?”

Tracey Flye’s nimble direction, Stephanie Graham’s elegant choreography, Lorenzo Savoini’s sumptuous sets (except, of course, for the dungeon scene) and Sue LePage’s wittily conceived costumes all work together to make this soufflé of a musical the treat it is. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was the most light-hearted show of Stratford opening week and it is sure to serve as a welcome respite from the real world throughout the season.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Jonathan Goad as Lawrence and Liam Tobin as Freddy; Jonathan Goad as Lawrence with ensemble; Liam Tobin as Freddy and Shakura Dickson as Christine; Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Muriel and Derek Kwan as Andre. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca