Fifty years ago, sexy stories usually came wrapped either in sentimentality or a jolly “just-kidding” safety packages. The unwrapping and decoding was considered part of the fun. The prize – titillation – was exactly then what it is and always has been.

Stephanie Fieger as Gabriella

and Joseph Urla as Robert

in Boeing-Boeing.

^{Photo by Craig Schwartz}

Nature remains, to paraphrase Tennyson, “Pink of tit and ass.”

The unlikely success of some reborn candy corn called Boeing-Boeing in London, on Broadway and now at the Old Globe speaks not to any fresh revisionist sensitivity but rather to the immense skill and taste of Matthew Warchus, the director who has combined clever theatrical archeology with immense stage smarts.

The bright idea that playwright Marc Camoletti had in 1960 was a technological twist for an ancient comic machine, the sex farce. One of the prime male fantasies of the day involved airline stewardesses, the sleek, friendly and contractually unattached cuties whose constant globe-trotting seemed ideal environment for the casual sex opportunities essential to farce.

So Camoletti created Bernard, an opportunistic sex connoisseur armed with an omnibus airline schedule in one printed volume (plausible back then) and a travel agent pal at the international airport. Thus armed, Bernard is able to juggle his schedule carefully enough to maintain three liaisons at a time, as he demonstrates boastfully for his nerdy American visitor.

Of course, schedules can change. And that’s when the farce starts. The only question left is whether two guys, three girls and a set with seven doors will generate enough romp to fill Act II.

The Brits have a taste for such dirty jokes, especially the ones from France that feature toothsome female flesh, so Beverley Cross’ adaptation of “Boeing-Boeing” ran in London for a surprising seven years. The Broadway version crashed after just 23 performances, American audiences apparently finding it a bit too sleazy. (There was a Jerry Lewis-Tony Curtis film, thankfully forgotten.)

I must have seen this thing back in the day but I can’t remember anything about it except a smile at the title’s mixture of the clever, the surreal, the smutty and the potential for product placement.

These days, you don’t encounter many such packages and here’s why: The three girls don’t see themselves as sex toys. They each consider themselves engaged to Bernard. That’s a necessary conventions of the day, but at least two of the three seem to take it very seriously.

Therefore, despite all the jolly knockabout comedy, this Bernard can only be seem as a contemptible, lying cad, preying on the dreams of women he doesn’t deserve. And guilt falls too on his wide-eyed friend from Wisconsin and his grumpy, dumpy maid-of-all-work, not to mention that unseen procurer at the airport. If they don’t help Bernard maintain the lies, there’s no show.

Not so funny for audiences now used to considering both sides of sexual equations. And that’s why, as I say, there aren’t many Boeing-Boeings anymore.

Enter Warchus, one of London’s hottest directors of the moment. (The actual Globe staging has been done by Mark Schneider, a frequent Warchus collaborator, who either delivered the goods in superior fashion or deserves himself all the slavish praise I’m about to heap on Warchus.)

He’s installed this soiled bauble inside a 1960s bubble with only passing relevance to reality. There’s no night or day, no sense of a world beyond those doors. The locale is allegedly Paris, but really it could be any place at an airline hub. Frankfurt, maybe, or Dallas-Fort Worth. Nobody speaks French, even when answering the telephone. And WE don’t see the knockout view that so awes the nerd.

Much of this bubble is the work of designer Rob Howell, whose smashing set is all white, crisscrossed with precisely absurd molding and accented with the uncomfortable furniture and fixtures of the day, including an amazing circular carpet with three non-concentric discs of pastel sherbet colors.

And the costumes, especially the bright, brief uniforms for the three stewardesses, are major stand-alone fantasies in themselves. They are, as a character says, “So...so...Well-tailored.” Indeed. The other three cast-members probably wear something too. I don’t remember.

So, armed with this play and this bubble, Warchus proceeds with the magic.

The rules of farce require that all eligible couples be paired off at the end. But here we have three girls and two boys. (The housekeeper? Forget it. That was territory ignored in 1960.) So one of the girls is going to be left out at the final curtain.

By careful emphasis and skilled shaping, Warchus makes this question more central to the play than how Bernard is going to keep his juggling act intact. Each of them women become real people worth caring about. The question becomes, do either of the guys deserve any of these girls?

And what glorious women they are, radiating healthy vitality and charm well beyond any professional requirements. Also, they’re gorgeous. The show is a lag-man’s dream. (Not guys who run errands, but the one with a taste for shapely gams.) These three pairs of pins are so featured in the show that they get the first curtain call by themselves.

The girls they carry are Trans-World Airlines’ Gloria, Alitalia’s Gabriella and Lufthansa’s Gretchen. (Bernard the creep brags that it’s useful to pick packs of partners with the same first initial.)

Liv Rooth plays Gloria, the American, like a berserk Humvee seeking further kinky variations and more food for her ketchup, pausing to pose as an art deco hood ornament and generally brandishing her body like a whip.

Stephanie Fieger is cool, poised and nurturing as the so-appealing Gabriella and Caralyn Kozlowski’s Gretchen is over the top with Teutonic menace, Wagnerian extravaganza and moist angst.

All three are delightful, accomplished artists at the peak of their powers. And did I mention they’re also major babes?

Rob Breckenridge plays Bernard with less frenzy and exhaustion than you might expect while Joseph Urla brings physical comedy poise and a nice childlike bedazzlement to the nebbish friend. As the frumpy, dumpy housekeeper, Nancy Robinette seems out of sync with the rest of the show but it’s not important. She’s just part of the machinery.

All of them have been given permission to indulge in episodes almost over the top: The scream that plasters others to the wall. The stagger that would break most people’s leg. The motley luggage than must be moved about. The looooonng take. The gay misunderstandings.

The achievement of Warchus (and Schneider) is to deliver all the fun expected from a farce while at the same time finding the humanity of characters designed as caricature stereotypes. And if he hasn’t done the same for the others, that’s fine. We still get not only our expected fun but also the chance to watch the worms turn.

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