By RON FOLEY MACDONALD THE SUNDAY DAILY NEWS

The Associated Press

Bette MacDonald's comedy is superior in Nunsense

Nunsense by Dan Goggin, Directed by Cliff Le Jeune and starring Belle MacDonald. Presented by Neptune Theatre at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium until April 20.

NEPTUNE THEATRE'S last mainstage production for the season - the thoroughly wonky musical comedy Nunsense seems ideally suited for Cape Breton comedian Bette MacDonald. MacDonald, a major talent who can hold a show together handily by herself, heads a small, but energetic five-woman cast. It's a grandly silly show, initially charming, and ultimately explosively funny.

Nunsense, like many musicals, is held together by the slimmest of narrative threads. Five nuns rally to put on a show in a high school auditorium that is set up for the student body's annual musical, the next nights production of Grease. The bright, nostalgic artifacts that dominate the stage - a diner and the back seat of a ‘50s Chevy at a drive-in - broadly suggest that the nuns are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being a nun, however, meant you were always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Author, Dan Goggin, cleverly exploits this anomaly, Watching the delicious reversal of habit-clad, supposedly reserved and repressed women running afoul of the amateur theatrical world where they must become uninhibited and at times, totally extroverted, is indeed a funny starting point. The real difficulty is sustaining the comic writing to keep the show going. But rest assured, Goggin has provided enough gags that even a gaggle of lawyers and accountants could put on a successful version of Nunsense. With Bette MacDonald as the Mother Superior, the play is very funny indeed.

Explaining Nunsense's narrative is like trying to explain gravity. It's just there The hopelessly convoluted story is really a delightfully flimsy excuse to get five wacky habit-clad nuns on stage to sing, tell jokes, mug shamelessly, and generally make fools of themselves,

Director Cliff Le Jeune has added an interactive level to the show, having the nuns patrol the auditorium as people are being seated, conducting a demented question-and-answer session, and getting everyone to do the "wave." Its pretty silly all right, but it's an old theatrical device used to break down the distance between the audience and the players. Nunsense, then, becomes a collective experience where the audience shares the actor's triumphs and embarrassments. There's a subtle, fascinating undercurrent in Nunsense that deals with the relationship between religion and theatre.

These five women, all authority figures in a world that has passed them by, manage to reconnect with the basic religious beginnings of drama. As the audience follows their off-kilter activities - from the Mother Superior's hilarious and unexpected encounter with mind-altering drugs to Sister Mary Amnesia's quest for her forgotten identity - the audience seems to expeHence it also for the first time. It's that collision of innocence and experience, played for comedy but with a little poignant sting, that give this play its resonance.

Nunsense may not be Ibsen or even Shakespeare. It is, however, consistently entertaining and often howlingly funny. The second act deteriorates into a series of set pieces (a couple of showstopping songs and an irreverent catalogue of religious cookbook ideas) that almost reduce Nunsense to the status of a revue. When the narrative eventually ties itself up, you're laughing too hard to notice.

The rest of the cast - Kelly-Ruth Mercier, Patricia Zentilli, Christina Gordon and Adrienne Wilson - bring verve and spunk to their sweetly guileless characters, The band, lead by sister' Lisa St. Clair, are punchy and well-directed. Le Jeune's deliberately goofy choreography adds just the right level of camp to the proceedings.

While Nunsense sends up the contemplative life, it never looks down at the dedicated women who give their lives in service. Surprisingly compassionate, Nunsense is nonetheless an uproariously funny way to ring in the spring.