A painter's demise produces profits

Norbert Leo Butz in crimson ringlets and silk taffeta (pink in the first act and robin's egg blue after intermission) is a sight to behold.

Done up in drag, the actor is the fireplug who jump-starts "Is He Dead?" — a long-lost Mark Twain farce adapted by David Ives and directed by Michael Blakemore with a sure ear for language and an even surer eye for physical comedy. Their teamwork is one of the most felicitous collaborations of the season.

Farce is the theatrical equivalent of a wind-up toy. It requires some exertion before the mechanics kick in and produce (one hopes) the required laughs. And so it is with "Is He Dead?" Act 1 marks time, dutifully laying the groundwork for the inspired antics of the play's riotously funny second half.

Butz, who won a Tony Award for "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," heads a cast of gifted character actors who merrily work their way through the plot, a satiric examination of greed in the art world of 1840s Paris. It focuses on real-life painter Jean-Francois Millet, perhaps the best known painter of Twain's day.

In Twain's version, a young Millet, played by Butz, is promising but penniless. He surmises monetary rewards won't really kick in until after he's dead. So why not pretend to be on the way out, disappear and collect the money now, posing as his sister, a widow named Daisy Tillou.

The lady, Millet in disguise, turns heads and causes complications. As Daisy, he is pursued by a villainous art dealer, a picture-perfect and hilariously snarling Byron Jennings. The play's comic highlight occurs during their Act 2 assignation in which the widow, determined to thwart his advances, (literally) falls apart.

The play, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, has more going on, of course. Our hero has the required love interest, the sweetly appealing Marie (Jenn Gambatese) whose father (John McMartin) also is threatened by the dastardly art dealer.

There also are dotty neighbors (Patricia Connolly and Marylouise Burke) as well as Millet's jovial cohorts in pulling off the female impersonation (Michael McGrath, Tom Alan Robbins and Jeremy Bobb).

Best of all is David Pittu, who in a variety of roles, plays a foppish English art buyer, an unctuous manservant and the king of France. Quite a range — and all of them immensely comic.

The production looks opulent. Peter J. Davison's settings, from Millet's painting-filled studio to the widow's grand drawing room, and Martin Pakledinaz's costumes, recall a grander, more genteel time.

Ives has experience as an adapter, having revised and condensed the books of vintage Broadway musicals for City Center's "Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert." It's not easy to tell where Twain trails off and Ives takes over.

The two men share a delightful comic sensibility that Ives demonstrated most emphatically in his collection of one-act plays called "All in the Timing."

Twain wrote "Is He Dead?" in 1898, but it was never produced. The play was rediscovered in 2002 by Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, an English professor at Stanford University, and published the following year.

"Is He Dead?" may be more than a century old, but its jaundiced view of the pursuit of money seems remarkably modern. But then avarice never goes out of style.