The Bedlam Theater’s production of Vanity Fair at the Pearl Theater is a romp celebrating life’s vagaries, the ups and downs of fortune’s wheel. Kate Hamill is its mastermind, manipulating William Makepeace Thackeray’s words as playwright, and everyone else as Vanity Fair’s star Becky Sharp, down on her luck child who makes it big in marriage and money, only to lose it all again. As she did so brilliantly last year with her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, Hamill injects the right amount of wink-wink at the audience through pauses when the cast breaks into contemporary dance. And then these able performers return to their intertwining plots of who weds whom and to what degree of betrayal and misery. Class and money make the man. It’s all too funny!

Joining Hamill in this highly physical endeavor is a wonderful cast: especially good as Amelia Sedley, Becky’s friend and foil is Joey Parsons. Zachary Fine, Brad Heberlee, Tom O’Keefe, Ryan Quinn and Debargo Sanyal play a variety of roles including women. Under Eric Tucker’s direction, this tale of upward and downward mobility moves briskly, and with many sight gags; Sandra Goldmark’s furnishings on wheels underscore the movement of middle class aspirations. We wondered whether Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes got the name Crawley in a deft borrowing from Vanity Fair.

Regina Weinreich

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