Lady's good in 'Importance of Being Earnest'

Those lips. (Cheshire.) Those eyes. (Lizard.) That hat. (Winged-victory, preparing for takeoff.) Every brocaded sneer, each well-tasted vowel in Brian Bedford's embodiment of Lady Bracknell has both the exquisite bemusement of style and the rare transparency of truth.

There are three irresistible reasons to see "The Importance of Being Earnest," which Bedford directs as well as dominates in the Roundabout Theatre Company's mixed blessing of a revival.

One, obviously, is Bedford, who has brought his celebrated production (but only one of the actors) from Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The other is Desmond Heeley's decor - sets and Victorian costumes as preposterously sumptuous yet as handsome as Oscar Wilde's 1895 social satire demands.

Finally, there is Wilde's comedy about men who'll say anything to women and women who want men named Earnest - a nonstop marvel of historically brilliant epigrams placed decorously in the mouths of foolish people and nestled impertinently within the confines of a conventional form.

And that, more or less, is that. Here the young romantics, whose duplicities, flirtations and emotional convolutions take up most of the three-act play, are generally more conscientious than charming - as if taking the earnest in the title at face value.

Instead of twinkling like the gold flecks on Heeley's show curtain, they hit the humor and bury the wit in some of the theater's most demanding toss-away conversations.

Veterans Paxton Whitehead and Dana Ivey are as reliable as we desperately need them to be in the small but grounding comic roles of the country mice, Rev. Chasuble and the spinster tutor, Miss Prism.

But Santino Fontana, miscast as the upper-class rogue Algernon, especially in the first act, says clever things without ever suggesting he might be a clever person. David Furr makes a more solid, if stolid, Worthing, Algernon's friend who courts Gwendolyn under the name Earnest. Sara Topham, the sole holdover from Stratford, is comfortably arch with Gwendolyn's artifice but not really engaging. The contrast between her and Charlotte Parry's likably impetuous Cecily suggests one or the other has wandered in from another play.

"Earnest" cries out to be a sparkling ensemble, not a star vehicle. On the other hand, when Bedford's Lady Bracknell takes over like the plumed Mad Queen of self-deluded dignity, much, if not quite all, is forgiven.