Noel Coward, the man who modestly admitted to a talent to amuse, knew the joys of repertory. For many years in England’s resident, repertory companies, an actor who played a king one night would do his best to conjure a beggar the next night. During the hungry 1930s, Coward composed a series of 10 short plays to keep himself and his pals employed.

Not that the plot of this 100-minute intermissionless fun fest cannot be followed, especially if you can check with attentive friends when it’s over. What we have here is a hotfoot for pedestrian reviewers who might feel the need to try to explain all the plot twists.

Twain buffs will have to squint to find marks of the author’s distinctive hand in the action or dialogue. The expected satire, usually Twain’s long suit, is marginal. Replacing it is farce. Even including “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” nothing with Twain’s name on it is a greater laugh riot.

Nothing in this show ever stoops to petit bourgeois ingratiation. So we have non-stop talk about sex for about two hours, stylized penises, even a forced striptease (down to a body stocking), but not one pant of eroticism. The playwright’s celebrated raucousness is reduced to about a half-dozen laughs.

Trim (maybe too trim) and blonde (a lighter shade than before) Lindsey (Danielle Valeriano) survives in a barren apartment with no place to sit down. A knock at the door brings a discarded boyfriend, Jordan (Ryan Santiago). Suspicious, she growls that her meddlesome parents or his own nosey nature might have sent him to check up on her.

We never fail to notice that actress Kimbrough is of African-American parentage. This is not nontraditional casting. She’s supposed to be black, although no other Egyptian or member of the cast shares that heritage.

Melissa writes to Andy, “You’re always doing the right thing—all the time.” And more teasingly, given her abilities as an artist, “I’ve drawn pictures of us with our bathing suits off.

There are families, and then there are dynasties. Asked to name an acting family linked to Central New York, most people would cite the Baldwins, Alec, William, Daniel and Stephen. To embrace both genders and more than one generation, you have to look elsewhere, to the Barbours.

Don’t feel left behind if you have never heard of the original film or its director. In the mid- to late-1920s, before Stalin exerted his murderous grip, Soviet cinema was the most innovative in the world, led by such stillrevered names as V.I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

Earlier planners at Syracuse Stage used to call January the “suicide slot.” With older subscribers snowbirding it south and locals sometimes too timid to venture out on frigid nights, almost anything Syracuse Stage attempted faced rows and rows of empty seats.