At its best, the novel does this through thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot twists.
Jerome's main rival is Jonah (Matt Keeslar), a handsome square (to say just how much of a square would be to give away a dumb but amusing plot twist) whose amateurish paintings inspire almost universal enthusiasm.
For John Wells, who co-authored the Private Eye column and acted Sir Denis in the stage version, the reinterpretation is nothing but "an extremely amusing plot hatched between Carol and Denis".
Amid strobe-lighted dance segments (Robin Carrigan's mix-and-match choreography is consistently amusing) the plot shifts to drama, Mr. Buggeln notably underscoring Molière's points about the suppression of women.
Assorted nitwitted women fret and flit about; an amusing side plot involves the infatuation some of them have with a pretentious poet (played as a bling-laden rap type by George Drance, the company's artistic director).
Another excursion provides the surprising climax to an amusing side plot about Newton, who just doesn't get relativity and quantum theory and keeps pestering Einstein to explain what was so wrong with the clockwork world he described in the 17th century.
But then the panic subsided and it began to feature in disturbing but kind of amusing sub-plots; in 1992, for example, a Japanese cult went to Zaire to "help" the victims of the virus.
But what matters is less the plots, amusing and outrageous though those are, than the aching sense that these people have become the reader's friends, an attractive, forgiving, alternative family one can only dream of joining.
Though avoiding criminally dysfunctional families or unwanted pregnancies, her cleverly plotted and amusing adventures deal frankly with emotional clumsiness, parental neglect, jealousy between siblings and a general sense of being an outcast.
At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.
The picture runs its course smoothly enough, with a few amusing scenes and a whodunit plot that's mildly suspenseful, provided you don't pay very close attention.
