Greed pays for ‘Sly Fox’ at TWS

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The devout Mrs. Truckle (Kathy Kusper, left), offers a prayer, while Miss Fancy (Lori D'Asta) has designs on Sly (Bill Hammack), who is clearly interested in other things in "Sly Fox."

‘Sly Fox’

Theatre of Western Springs, 4384 Hampton Ave.

Performances through Jan. 29: 8 p.m. Jan. 19, 20, 21, 26 and 27; 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22; 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Jan. 28; and 2:30 p.m. Jan. 29

Tickets are $18 and $20

(708) 246-3380 or visit www.theatrewesternsprings.com

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Updated: January 18, 2012 11:16AM

It’s been 400 years since the first production of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone” (“The Fox”), but a play that makes fun of insatiable greed is never going to have timeliness trouble — especially after it’s been updated by one of the 20th century’s most successful comedy writers.

See for yourself when “Sly Fox,” Larry Gelbart’s adaptation of Jonson’s Elizabethan satire, opens Jan. 19 at the Theatre of Western Springs.

Gelbart, who co-wrote “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum” and the screenplays for “Tootsie” and “Oh God” in addition to creating TV’s “M*A*S*H,” made two significant changes to “Volpone.” He shifted the setting from Renaissance Venice to San Francisco during the Gold Rush and he changed the style of comedy from satire to full-tilt farce.

“Sly Fox” was a smash hit when it debuted on Broadway in 1976, featuring George C. Scott as Foxwell J. Sly, a con man who pretends to be dying in order to bilk three greedy men (each competing to be named his sole heir) of their wealth.

“It’s a brilliant adaptation,” said Bill Hammack, a Theatre of Western Springs company member since 1994 — and the company’s managing director. “It explores the same themes, but it’s entirely different in style; this is a really broad, physical, fall-out-of-your-seat-laughing kind of comedy.”

Think small

That doesn’t mean, though, that this “Fox” has no bite. The play remains a scathing critique of the dark side of human nature, Hammack said, with one of his lines as the title character summing up the show’s philosophical point of view: “Never think too little of people; there’s always a little less to be thought.”

In fact, Hammack added, Jeff Award-nominated director Jim Schneider has incorporated cues including color schemes to identify each of the characters with one of the seven deadly sins. Except for Sly, of course. “My character pretty much embodies all seven,” he said, with an understandable touch of pride.

This production has the advantage of learning from the mistakes made during a 2004 Broadway revival of “Sly Fox” starring Richard Dreyfuss, which attempted to present Sly as a character with more-or-less realistic dimensions — while everyone else was played with classic, farcical exaggeration.

“It failed miserably,” Hammack said. “The reviews we’re terrible. That’s why I’m playing Sly as broadly as possible, the same as everyone else. Our show is much more in keeping with the original 1976 production, which was reportedly drop-dead funny.”

Broad laughs

“Everything in ‘Sly Fox’ has to be played as if life-and-death stakes were on the line,” said director Schneider, who has set his production in a San Francisco vaudeville theater so that painted backdrops can be used for the rapid-fire set changes. “This show really is as over-the-top as it gets. The characters are larger-than-life, people are running in and out of doors, the pace never lets up for a second — it’s that kind of show.

Schneider also noted that “Sly Fox” is likely to be one of the more risqué shows ever staged at Theatre of Western Springs, since lust runs a close second to greed on the show’s hit parade of deadly sins. (Sly convinces one of his victims, an insanely jealous husband, to fork over his bodacious wife.)

But greed is still number one with a bullet for “Sly Fox.”

“Fox has a line that says, basically, ‘Gold is here to make me wealthy and to deprive others,’ ” Schneider said. “What could be more timely in terms of what’s been going on with Wall Street and the global economy?”