PARTY DIP Sandys shows Cares how much he cares.

Photo: Johnny Knight

“Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes,” judges Emperor Joseph II in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, half rightly. “In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness.” Whether Beaumarchais’s 1781 play addressed or stoked class warfare is debatable, as is its contribution to the French Revolution. But the farce itself, in the context of Mozart’s opera or Ranjit Bolt’s smashing contemporary version, is unquestionably masterful, a romp whose social criticism is more implicit than announced. The same can be said of Remy Bumppo’s fine production, a top-to-bottom delight whose message is nestled in an abundance of screwball craft.

Beaumarchais’s story concerns a lecherous count who lusts for the fiancée of his right-hand man, Figaro. To stop the Count from exercising his right to “break in” the wives of his subordinates, the cagey Figaro concocts a mistaken-identity plot that’ll trick his buffoonish boss into decency. The upstairs-downstairs disjunction comes into sharpest focus in dance numbers/scene changes run by servants who almost menace their betters, with great credit due to Caroline Fourmy, whose punchy choreography is the pillar of the show; guided by its blueprint and Berry’s propulsive direction, the individually terrific actors coalesce into a perfectly firing comic machine. Sandys makes stylized hay of the title role, and Cares and Fisher sparkle as the leading ladies. Anderson, as randy page Cherubin, gives a standout supporting performance, the most precisely hilarious here. But it’s Dempsey’s loose virtuosity, deadpan instincts and number-one idiot shtick as the Count that hold everything together.