The Underpants
Steve Martin, Adapted from Carl Sternheim
San Jose Stage Company
Even though they were “clean cotton, neat, and perfectly ironed,” when the young and beautiful Louise drops her bloomers while standing on a bench in Dusseldorf to see the passing king, heads quickly turn, male hearts skip a beat, and news of the scandal spreads fast — especially when the event is announced at the local train station. For her straight-laced husband of not quite one year, Theo — a lowly clerk in the king’s court who treasures being mediocre and unnoticed — the two-second event is a feared career and reputation disaster in the making. For two men seeking to rent the couple’s extra room, it is an opportunity for a secret tryst with the woman whose bare bottom they quickly glanced. And for Gertrude, the nosy neighbor in the apartment above, it is an invitation to be a “fairy godmother” and to teach Louise some tricks about flirting and having an affair.
First conceived by the German playwright Carl Sternheim in 1910 as the farce Die Hose, the above set-up cries for a current-day master of comic silliness eager to be a bit naughty — someone like Steve Martin — to update the pithy puns and the erotically suggestive innuendos while retaining the time and place of the original play. In 2002, the creator of the light-hearted and popular Picasso at the Lapin Agile sent his adaptation, The Underpants, to an Off-Broadway premiere; and the resulting guffaws have generated many local productions coast-to-coast ever since. With a cast of locally beloved comic stars, San Jose Stage Company opens its own uproarious version of Steve Martin’s The Underpants under the tongue-in-cheek, quick-witted direction of Kimberly Mohne Hill.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 4 E
The Underpants continues through April 27, 2025, in a ninety-minute (no intermission) production by San Jose Stage Company, 490 South 1st Street, San Jose, CA. Tickets are available online at www.thestage.org, by email at boxoffice@thestage.com, or by phone at 408-283-7142.
Photo Credit: Dave Lepori
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