The Guinness Book of World Records says Marc Camoletti's Boeing-Boeing (1960) is the French play most often produced around the world. I suggest Cyrano de Bergerac holds the title; but if I'm wrong, I can live with it. Either way, it's easy to see from Olympia Little Theatre's production (of a 2008 Broadway adaptation of Boeing-Boeing) why its popularity endures.

Somewhere along the way, Boeing Boeing lost its hyphen, but never lost a distinctly French, laissez-faire attitude toward sex and romance. Zach Holstine plays Bernard, in this version an American in Paris, who's happy to provide temporary lodgings for a visiting Wisconsin friend, Robert (Ken Luce). Robert is stunned by the beauty of Bernard's fiancée, Gloria (Michaela Hickey), a flight attendant for Pan Am. Then, a short time later, he's equally stunned by the beauty of Bernard's second fiancée, an Alitalia stewardess named Gabriella (Maisha Gannie). That's just Act I of a fully three-act farce, complete with the requisite slamming doors, lingerie, and mistaken identities engendering ill-advised smooches.

See, Bernard's exhausting domestic life is a miracle of time management. He keeps a book of airline schedules handy, and that allows him to bid one oblivious air hostess adieu as another touches down at Orly. Then a "Super Boeing" 720 engine condenses his timetable, lofting him deep into Jack Tripper's airspace. Quelle surprise.

My foremost complaint with this production, exacerbated by OLT's reverberant acoustics, is a few accents that hail from the wrong country, if not the wrong planet. This makes several hysterical lines all but impossible to decipher, often in scenes featuring Teresa Forster's Gretchen (a Lufthansa flight attendant). Luckily, it was easier to follow Lanita Grice's Berthe, Bernard's disgruntled French housemaid, who gets many of Camoletti's most delightful zingers.

That said, this is a terrific show, impressively polished on opening night. Matthew Moeller's swingin' apartment set ups the farcical ante with a trio of four-sided periaktoi (rotating panels) in the upstage wall. The costumes, by Diana Purvine, are mod, though her deployment of towels abuses credulity. Luce and Grice in particular pitch their characters at precisely the right comedic level, namely un centimètre just below over the top. The cast as a whole is attractive and committed to the absurd proceedings, and Holstine knows when to allow his straight-man composure to unravel.

A few goofy punch lines play better in Paris than Olympia, I imagine - I'm thinking of gags about Americans' deplorable taste in food - and the Nouvelle Vague gender politics are dated at best. But listen: I haven't heard so many good, hard laughs in a theater in a long time. Some of these sincere belly laughs were mine. Director Kathryn Beall keeps the action moving, and her actors seem to recall which bedroom every "sexy stew" is in at all times. That alone marks an impressive accomplishment.

BOEING BOEING, 7:55 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1:55 p.m. Sunday, through April 13, Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave. NE, Olympia, $10-$14, 360.786.9484