Wackiness will ensue: A trio of new cast members join 'Don't Dress for Dinner'

The dull, dreary, grindstone grey last blast of winter – surely there’s no better time of year for a springy, sunny sex farce with more giggles per hour than a tank of nitrous oxide. And now there’s three more fine reasons to take in the featherweight fun of Marc Camoletti’s Don’t Dress For Dinner: Gene Weygandt, Katherine Keberlein and Bethany Caputo have joined the cast.

Weygandt is the veteran of the group, with 20+ years as one of the city’s most intriguing song ‘n dance men. His unique combination of charisma and menace were put to great use during his three-year run as the not-always-so-wonderful Wizard of Oz in Wicked. Here and on Broadway, Wegandt’s 11th hour waltz and troubling green potion were a revelatory plot point in the Baumian blockbuster . The Park Ridge resident and long-time motorcycle enthusiast (when we spoke last year, he was renovating a 30-year-old BMW) is back at the Royal George 23 years after opening the place in 1986 with Little Shop of Horrors. In Don't Dress for Dinner, Weygandt plays Bernard, a long-married fellow whose plans for a romantic rendezvous with his sexbomb supermodel mistress go way astray after his wife cancels plans to leave town for an illicit rendezvous with her paramour.

Keberlein plays the model, reprising a role that put the voom in va-va-va voom when a different production of “Don’t Dress for Dinner” played the Metropolis Center for the Performing Arts in Arlington Heights in 2007.We caught Keberlein last year in an ectoplasmic turn as Elvira, the mischief-making ex-wife ghost in the Oak Park Festival Theatre’s 2008 staging of Blithe Spirit. Worth noting: Keberlein’s day job, as it were, is as managing director for Chicago’s Backstage Theatre Company (where you can see The Memory of Water through March 28) .

As for Caputo, she plays the caterer Bernard has hired for his romantic weekend, a diminutive Cordon Bleu chef who has a keen head for business and the same name as his mistress. Caputo’s been doing substantial work in Chicago and regional theaters around the country for years – We remember her as a beguiling Thomasina in Court Theatre’s 2007 Arcadia and holding her own as Jessica against the mighty Mike Mussbaum’s Shylock when Chicago Shakespeare did The Merchant of Venice in 2005.

Weygandt, Caputo and Keberlein join the comically gifted cast of Patricia Kalember, Darren Pettie and Brendan Averett. And they are gifted: When we saw a different production of “Don’t Dress” a few years back, we were wholly underwhelmed to put it politely. When we saw this production - directed by John Tillinger and presented by Chicago-based British Stage Company, LLC – we were engulfed in chuckles as wackiness ensued from start to finish.

Photos: Top Gene Weygandt, center - Katherine Keberlein; bottom, Bethany Caputo