Thanks to a handsome cast and skillful direction, Vista’s Moonlight Stage Productions can demonstrate that Noel Coward’s dear “Hay Fever” has life in it yet.

Amazingly enough, it has been over 80 years since the four outrageous members of the bohemian Bliss family were first seen to discover that each of them had invited a weekend guest to their country home, equipped with just two spare bedrooms, the Japanese Room and Little Hell.

Sleeping arrangements are not the subject of “Hay Fever” although romance certainly is in the air, launched and floated by the Blisses who, stymied at their planned individual liaisons, turn instead toward a sprawling extravaganza of melodrama based on casual acts by the unsuspecting guests.

In London, 1924, Coward would have found available countless superb performers to play these delightful caricatures of flappers, vamps, grande dames, mad youths and so forth, all part of the day’s popular mainstream.

Now, charming and attractive actors must be drilled and guided to some form of that long-ago style that connects with a 21st-century viewers, for period revivals like this can recreate every detail of delivery and decor exactly right... except the audience.

Director Eric Bishop’s solution is a sort of genial energy and driving pace that plows right on past faded conceits and concentrates on illuminating the timeless portion of Coward’s peerless, brittle wit.

Some of Bishop’s actors are more prepared than others; some are better cast. Mere diction is a nagging concern. But all can be said to do the jobs properly and the result is a fond bit of exotic stage history.

Charles Riendeau plays the cheap novelist who heads the family and Summer Spiro is a bit of fluff he wants to study as a character type. Dagmar K. Fields is the mother, a Great Lady of the popular stage entering the farewell-tour part of her career and Nathan Venzara is the beefy young admirer she wishes to toy with further.

The Bliss daughter, played by the lovely Aimee Janelle Nelson, has found a “diplomatist” who interests her (Sean Vernon as a hopeless stuffed-shirt) and Thomas Hall, as the moody Bliss son, has invited a slinky adventuress of a certain age, played with ravishing poise by Terri Park.

Lots of mix-and-match in such an assemblage and Coward assembles all the best bits. Add Li-Anne Rowswell as an intermittently Cockney servant (she’s really Madame’s professional dresser) and Bishop has enough performance oomph to summon the master’s voice.

The cast deserves a better physical production. Marty Burnett’s set has good bones but indifferent dressing. Paul A. Canaletti Jr.’s lighting bounces off the onstage windows. Roslyn Lehman’s costumes are fun but more care to period detail (Panty hose? T-shirts?) would have been more fun yet. And Chris Luessman’s strings of period pop-song recordings seem carelessly random.

Still, though, the important stuff – the audacious charm, the crackling wit, the sly outrageousness – is present in sufficient supply to make this show a substantial delight.

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