wiggery

On a recent sunny afternoon Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, was standing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of its new "Dangerous Liaisons" exhibition, an impressive collection of some of the most sumptuous costumes, gowns and wiggery that 18th-century France could create.

The big acts in this circus of deceptions and misconceptions come between Harpagon and his son, Cleante, forthrightly played by Steve Hofvendahl as the kind of clod who would love to be a dandy only can't quite master his green plastic cape and whose headpiece owes more to waggery than wiggery.