I'm a bit of an Anglophile. I love British just-about-everything, except for the food. But I especially love British humor. And after attending and enjoying a staged reading of Roy Smiles' Ying Tong last spring, I figured I'd really love the fully-mounted production at The Wilma Theater.

I never thought I'd say this about any production, ever, but I think I liked the staged reading better. There was something charming about the bare-bones production staged just once with talented local artists that just didn't come through in the complete production. It's not that the actors brought in from elsewhere weren't good (they were), or that the set wasn't better than a bare stage (it was – in fact at times, the set was the best part of the production). But something indescribable was lacking from the show. Something that made it ultimately unsatisfying.

That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy myself from the audience. There are some really wonderful moments in Ying Tong, and some very funny ones. (It is, after all, a play about a group of comedians.) Though none of the performers were the locals who performed in the reading (tsk tsk), they all got into the spirit of the show quite admirably: Steven Beckingham's Peter Sellers was pretty dead-on (it's hard to do impressions when you're already doing an impression); Colin McPhillamy was pleasantly dry as Wallace Greenslade; Ed Jewett was appropriately jolly as Harry Secombe; and David Beach believably mad as Spike Milligan. But the four actors didn't always seem to be working with each other onstage. In real life, they were certainly disparate personalities, and not without their conflicts – but in performance, even the differences must be harmonious, and in this production, they didn't seem to be. Jiri Zizka's direction sometimes seemed to pit the actors against one another in a game of "who can be more over the top?" – perhaps the way the real Goons operated, but a bit too much for the production. The script itself is ridiculous (not in a bad way), to be sure, but a production of it should still have a certain degree of control that at the Wilma seemed, if not lacking, then disproportionate to the need.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: there's much of Ying Tong that's very funny. But there's also much of Ying Tong that's very British. And despite my aforementioned Anglophilia, such things can go too far. The play is so chock-full of period British-isms that, without a translator who has some sort of historical awareness, many of the jokes fly right over the audience's heads and into the back wall of the theatre. It only takes a few failed jokes to hurt a play, and while the British woman beside me seemed to be quite enjoying herself, there was also uncomfortable rustling from the Yanks present while the actors waited a moment too long on a failed laugh line.

Perhaps the indescribable thing missing from the show wasn't any fault of the production. Perhaps I'm not British enough to get it. Perhaps I should just blame it on George Washington.

Steven Beckingham as Peter Sellers, David Beach as Spike Milligan, Ed Jewett as Harry Secombe, Colin McPhillamy as Wallace Greenslade in Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons, at the Wilma through March 16.