Neil Simon believes that if at first you do succeed, clone the master plan. Simon hit the jackpot in 1966 with Plaza Suite, a trio of one-act comedies all set in the same New York hotel room. Ten years later he used the same formula for California Suite.

Despite its setting, the play has plenty of those New York-styled zingers that have become Simon's calling card. The frolicsome foursome on stage delivers them like a blaze of bullets, and in the end who cares if a few miss their targets?

Of the four playlets, only the first never really lands. This is through no fault of Heather Goodall (as Hanna, the tightly wound New York divorcee) and Lawrence Stevenson (playing Billy, her ashram-seeking ex-husband.) Even Jane Fonda and Alan Alda could not make this sequence come to life in the film, and it appears Tammy Grimes and George Grizzard faced the same problems in the original Broadway production.

It's just that the author has the couple volleying quips back and forth with such precision that you wonder why they ever separated. They seem perfect together. Unfortunately, it takes them quite some time to get down to business, discussing which one of them their daughter will live with. There are, as usual, plenty of stinging truths in Simon's acerbically articulate script, but like the characters, it is almost too clever for its own good.

Fortunately, the second piece involving a married man who wakes up hung over with a strange girl passed out in his bed and his wife due to arrive any minute is comic gold. Alan Washbrook is hysterical as the frantic husband but it is Robin Phillips as his devoted wife who really steals the scene.

Goodall and Stevenson are back to open the second half with a segment so strong it could easily be turned into a full-length play. She plays a celebrated British actress in town to attend the Academy Awards, while he is her convenient (openly gay) husband. Goodall's larger-than-life take on this fading star balances humour with genuine pathos, while Stevenson endures her mood swings with touching devotion.

The final play is a short piece that caters to the schadenfreude set who dine on doom. Two couples have reached the end of a long and arduous joint vacation in a slapstick tour-de-force that allows all four performers to shine.

The ensemble under L. Garth Allen's sure direction creates such vivid characterizations that we learn just as much from the silences as we do from the dialogue. The sumptuous set outshines any hotel in California that I have ever visited.