They don't write them like this anymore! And except for a few musical comedies based on films, you don't see them on stage much either. John Murray and Allen Boretz's classic farce, Room Service, has returned and it is just as funny as you remember. The Peccadillo Theater Company revival which had a successful run this summer is back for a two month engagement with its original cast intact. Credit director Dan Wackerman with truly making this (as the production's subtitle says) a “screwball comedy.”

The Peccadillo Theater Company usually presents “forgotten American classics.” Room Service is in no sense a forgotten comedy, although it is a pleasure to welcome back its uproarious humor. Originally presented on Broadway in 1937, it was a George Abbott hit starring Sam Levene, Eddie Albert and Betty Field. The movie rights hit a new high when it was turned into a Marx Brothers movie in 1938 with Lucille Ball and Ann Miller in the supporting cast. In 1944 Frank Sinatra starred in a musical film retitled Step Lively . Jack Lemmon made his stage debut in a 1953 New York stage revival. Equity Library Theatre brought it back in 1963 with the young Sally Kirkland. It turned up again at Broadway's Edison Theatre in 1970 with Ron Liebman in the leading role. It was last seen locally in a major production when the Roundabout Theatre Company revived it in 1986 with a cast that included Mark Hamill, Lonny Price, Timothy Jerome, Keith Reddin, Anthony Arkin and Barbara Dana again playing “Hilda” as she had 16 years earlier.

Set in 1930, Room Service recounts the antics of shyster producer Gordon Miller as he tries to get the money to open his production of Godspeed, a cavalcade of American history as seenthroughthe eyes of a Polish miner. Besides his room at the White Way Hotel in Times Square, he is paying for bed and board for 19 starving actors as well as rehearsal space for the last seven weeks. The problem is he is broke, his room service has been cut off, and he already owes the hotel $1,200 (at Depression prices.) His brother-in-law is the hotel manager, but an auditor is on the way and sure to discover the scam. In walks the playwright who Miller thought was safely in Oswego, N.Y. Leo has quit his job and expects the second half of his author's advance to pay his way in the Big Apple. However, our playwright has a collection agency after him for non-payment on his typewriter, and Miller's director and assistant have both been locked out of their hotels. Faced with imminent eviction of his entire company, Miller has to keep coming up with more outrageous stalling tactics when a backer is found and the appointment to sign the contract is to be at Miller's hotel room.

Wackerman has paced the play so that it moves faster as it progresses which works just fine. The casting is impeccable and could not be bettered. Master of ceremonies of this three ring circus is David Edwards as the unflappable producer. Ironically (or maybe fortuitously), he has just finished touring in TheProducers , the only show in recent memory that is comparable to the screwball antics of Room Service . As Miller's director, Fred Berman has the comic timing and energy of the Marx Brothers and wears the requisite mustache. He is memorable in the scene where he threatens to rip off his clothes as yet one more stalling tactic. Dale Carman makes Miller's brother-in-law the nervous wimp he is intended to be.

Many of the supporting cast have memorable scenes or business into which they throw themselves body and soul. As the innocent playwright who must learn the ways of New York very quickly, Scott Evans energetically embraces a role in which he is asked first to play sick and then later dying to help out his producer. Sterling Coyne's hotel auditor gets so red in the face from the shenanigans he uncovers, you expect him to have a heart attack at any moment. Louis Michael Sacco demonstrates his versatility first as an impassioned Russian waiter (who is really an unemployed actor) and then later as the southern president of the hotel chain. Robert O'Gorman as Miller's assistant, Faker Englund, heartily goes along with any of his boss' harebrained ideas. Jerry Coyle has a wonderful scene as the hotel physician in which he tells off his boss and quits.

In a farce where characters put on five or six outfits simultaneously in order to escape their hotel bills, designer Gail Cooper-Hecht has a field day providing multiple costumes for the same actors, as well providing atmosphere for the thirties milieu. Chris Jones' hotel setting in brown, pink and green with its many doors is unobtrusively attractive. Room Service is guaranteed to send you out of the theater with a smile on your face in a time when we can surely use a ton of laughter.

Room Service (through January 29)

Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, between 6 ^th Ave. and Varick St., in Manhattan