STAGE WEST: "Arms and the Man" at Lamb's Players Theatre

"Arms and the Man" skewers love and war in Coronado.       Photo courtesy of Lamb's Players Theatre

            Not that there’s any doubt about what George Bernard Shaw thought of war in his searing “Arms and the Man,” but one line in the play – delivered by a “heroic” soldier! – all but shouts Shaw to the rafters: “War is a fraud! A hollow sham!”
            Romanticized love does not escape Shaw’s jaundiced eye either in this costumed affair set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. When another of his characters declares life to be a farce, he might as well have been indicting the sort of swooning, breast-heaving romance coveted by “Arms and the Man’s” heroine, the lovely aristocrat Raina Petkoff.
            So was Shaw, not even 40 when “Arms and the Man” premiered in 1894 just an “old” cynic, or did he have a valid point about two entities – war and love – that had been so idealized by writers as or less estimable than himself?
            As Lamb’s Players Theatre’s high-style production of “Arms and the Man,” directed by Deborah Gilmour Smyth (who played Raina herself at Lamb’s in the early ‘80s) and populated by a fun-loving cast suggests, Shaw knew what he was doing.
            “Arms and the Man” actually begins when the war between Bulgaria and Serbia has ended after only two weeks of fighting, with the former winning – winning what is not completely clear. Read your history books. In the house of Petkoff, Raina (Megan Carmitchel) can scarcely sleep for the thought that her beloved, Major Sergius Saranoff (Spencer Gerber) will be returning from the fray. So will her father, Major Paul Petkoff (Manny Fernandes), though neither Raina nor her mother Catherine (Melissa Fernandes) seems that jacked up this prospect.
            In the wake of some unnerving gunfire outside, Raina is roused from sort-of-sleep by the intrusion through her window doors of an exhausted, sword-bearing mercenary (MJ Sieber) who had been fighting on the side of the Serbs. For Raina, fear quickly gives way to fascination with this sputtering soldier, a man for whom the concept of heroism is hard to swallow and who, he tells her, prefers to carry chocolates than ammunition in his cartridge belt. So when a Bulgarian solider (Jordan Miller) invades the Petkoff home searching for an escapee, Raina hides her harried intruder from capture.
            Sweets for the sweet? She’s also fed the weak-with-hunger mercenary from her own box of chocolates.
            Much of the laughter from this entire ruse stems from the involvement of Raina’s mother; the two form a conspiracy to keep this episode from the ears of the returning majors, Petkoff and Saranoff.
            The minute we meet Sergius Saranoff, strutting like a peacock in military uniform and obviously loving himself more than he can love Raina or any woman, our sympathies are with the mercenary, who later arrives at the house, taut and cleaned up and identified as a Captain Bluntschli. Maybe his and Raina’s first encounter couldn’t be called a meet-cute, but there were enough indications from the start that these two were fated for coupling.
            Heightening the hapless intrigue is the presence of Raina’s maid Louka (Lizzie Morse, understudying for Katie Karel the night I saw this show). Unhappy with her domestic lot and far shrewder than the lady on whom she attends, Louka feigns disgust at Saranoff’s transparent flirtations, but she can’t conceal preferring his swagger to the doting, lecturing attentions of the house’s head manservant, Nicola (John Rosen).
            Not surprisingly, Raina’s secret gets out, and it’s only a matter of time before all concerned learn the identity of the “chocolate-cream soldier” for whom she’s affectionately signed a portrait of herself. How that photo is discovered is part of the comic climax’s runaround.
            Shaw wrote these characters to be played broadly, and they are at Lamb’s, just as they were when I first saw “Arms and the Man” 10 years ago at the Old Globe. Emoting and gesturing are part of the playwright’s strategy to cast these figures as if not stereotypes, archetypes of romanticized lovers and idealized war heroes.
            No one does this more broadly than Gerber, a graduate of the Coronado School of the Arts who is making his professional debut here as the mustachioed, preening Sergius Saranoff. What a way to break into regional theater – with license to go all out.
            The versatile Carmitchel is as at home with farce every bit as she is with serious drama; her local resume testifies to that.
            Sieber may be known to area audiences for his visceral turns in Backyard Renaissance Theatre productions (most recently “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and at Cygnet Theatre, where he shone two years ago in its staging of “The Little Fellow (or The Queen of Tarts),” Kate Hamil’s comedy-drama. In “Arms and the Man” he’s able to make the frantic and exasperating mercenary of Act One as credible as the cool and sharp-witted Captain Bluntschli of Act Two.
            It’s always a hoot when the Fernandeses, Melissa and Manny, turn up in the same cast. They’re real pro’s who thrive on this kind of fare. (Interestingly, they’re pairing up as George and Martha – hardly your fun-loving couple – in Carlsbad Playreaders’ staged reading of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Nov. 3.)
            Not to be lost in the ebullient performances at Lamb’s is the period costuming of Jemma Dutra or the alacrity in which director Gilmour Smyth moves the story along.
            Two hours (with intermission), in and out.
            It was a strange feeling the night I saw “Arms and the Man” to be one of the few in the audience laughing out loud. Possibly the sedate crowd preferred to chuckle under their collective breath, or maybe many just didn’t understood the tenor of the show, or Shaw’s intent. I did hear one theatergoer behind me afterward, on the way out, say to another: “Well, that play had a lot of words, didn’t it?”
            I wonder if he realized how biting and insightful those words were, and are.
            “Arms and the Man” runs through Nov. 16 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.