EDMONTON -- I'm sure when James Shirley was London's leading playwright back in the 1640s, The Lady of Pleasure was a ripper. The comedy exposed the silliness of searching for pleasure when happiness was a proper marriage (after all it was the time of the Puritans), showed that country folk can lose their way in the big city and demonstrated that people behave strangely when attending 17th-century soirees.

Somehow much of that has been lost in the last 360 years or so and what we are left with in Red Lips - The Musical is a pleasant, if rather inconsequential, tale on which to hang some really good music. It's not that Tim Ryan's book hasn't done a fine job of pushing the playwright into our times - it's that Shirley's folk don't resonate as they must have once done.
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