Palm Beach is where the rich – the Fitch rich, that is – go to play.

The Fitch manufacturing empire, which produces everything from chocolate to lingerie to pharmaceuticals to weapons, is run by old Wilton Fitch (Ryan Hilliard), who is about to retire and leave the business to son Lancelot (Matt Cavenaugh) – if he finds a suitable wife by the end of the season. Lance’s ambitious and much more competent sister Jessica (Anastasia Barzee) needs to find a way to ensure that doesn’t happen. Wilton’s other daughter, the somewhat sickly and decidedly mousy Victoria (Amanda Watkins), spends her time sneezing and writing, well, let’s say strange poetry.

Of course, the Fitches take along their serving staff – the two maids named Tessa (“To save money, I suppose,” conjectures Jessica), faithful butler Bixby (John Alban Coughlan) and new guy Jimmy (Noah Racey).

Meanwhile, in a slightly seedy section of New York, jilted dancer Liz (Erica Piccininni) plans to blow the joint and find herself a millionaire in – where else? – Palm Beach.

Love, lies and mistaken and concealed identities are fodder for the song mill of composer David Gursky and lyricist Robert Cary (who also co-wrote the book with Benjamin Feldman). The tunes are upbeat and funny, and even Mae West would appreciate the second-act showstopper “A Bad Man is Easy to Find” (“You find out his expertise is taking off his BVDs”).

La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff helms the world premiere of this fun, silly, determinedly inconsequential musical inspired by the screwball film comedies of the 1930s. To establish the mood, there’s a film screen onstage at the top of the show, where ads for Fitch products alternate with instructions like, “Ladies please remove your hats,” and warnings like, “Anyone raising a disturbance will be bounced.”

A typical McAnuff extravaganza, Palm Beach has gee-whiz production value to burn, including a small airplane suspended from the ceiling, a double revolving stage and an actor who dances on a balance beam, does a somersault and – like an Olympic gymnast – sticks the landing.

The year is 1939, war looms and so do familiar refrains such as Wilton’s wife Eustacia’s comment that, “Soon we might be speaking Japanese or German.” So, of course, the thing to do is have another drink – after all, it’s happy hour.

Happy, silly, goofy – they all apply. The plot of Palm Beach is loopy, and so are many of the characters, but there’s nothing wrong with a little silliness of a summer evening. Sit back, relax and enjoy the enormous talent on display. The show has already been extended a week.

Palm Beach, The Screwball Musical plays through July 17at the Mandell Weiss Theatre of the La Jolla Playhouse. Shows Mon.-Fri. at 8:00 p.m.; Sat. at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.; Sun. at 1:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858) 550-1010.

Flora Poste (Sarah Zimmerman), quintessential London city dweller, arrives at the family’s decaying old Cold Comfort Farm in rural Sussex to reconnect with her long lost and conveniently forgotten country cousins, the Starkadders.

What she finds is a collection of oddballs worthy of You Can’t Take it With You raised to the nth degree, who will provide a country mouse/city mouse confrontation of high hilarity.

Lamb’s Players Theatre presents the U.S. premiere of Cold Comfort Farm, adapted by Paul Doust from Stella Gibbons’ book and directed by Robert Smyth.

The cast is large and fungible, several actors morphing from one character to another in a blink. There is, for example, mama hen Judith (Deborah Gilmore Smyth) and her husband Amos (David Cochran Heath), minister to the “Quivering Brethren.” Their wispy daughter Elfine (Chrissy Reynolds-Vögele), slated to marry Urk (Chris Bresky), is looking for a way out. (Yes, Urk is as peculiar as his name.)

And don’t forget the Starkadder sons: down-to-earth Seth (Matt Thompson), who cleans up real nice; and the only real farmer of the bunch, stalwart Reuben (Patrick J. Duffy).

As in most British stories, up there on the hill is a castle. Tobacco Road meets the upper crust when the restive Elfine meets Richard Hawk-Monitor, son of blueblood Mrs. Hawk-Monitor. Part of the fun is in the double casting that has Smyth playing both the messy lunatic Judith and the snooty upper-crust Mrs. Hawk-Monitor, and Bresky appearing as both the mop-haired Urk and the aristocratic Hawk-Monitor heir. Likewise, Heath plays both the fire-and-brimstone Amos and Mrs. Hawk-Monitor’s stolid butler, Sneller.

And we mustn’t forget wrinkly old grandma Ada Doom (K.B. Mercer), who tells us over and over, “When I was young I saw something narsty in the woodshed.”

Poor Flora, whose mission includes finding out what that “narsty” thing was, is quite flummoxed by the pool of negativity she has stepped into, and finds solace in her own brand of self-help books: The Higher Common Sense and Pascal’s Pensées.

An unnamed narrator adds another layer of satiric goofiness to the proceedings, slithering onto the stage now and again to intone lines like, “Dawn creeps over the town like a sinister white animal” and, “The hot juice of reproduction rises in all things.”

Robert Smyth directs with a sure comedic touch, aided by Mike Buckley’s clever set, which occasions a fabulous second-act set-changing dance moving the location from farm to castle.

Stella Gibbons, author of the book, satirized the gloom, doom and fatalism of writers of the time such as Mary Webb (The Golden Arrow, Precious Bane), as well as the genre of fiction created by the likes of Emily Brontë, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.

Once again, a stellar Lamb’s cast carries the goofiness off. There is, however, a technical problem with sound. For some reason, as the actors turn to other areas of the house, their voices do not carry as well as they usually do.

The Starkadder family is larger than life and loony as they come, so enjoy the ride.

Cold Comfort Farm plays through July 17 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tues.-Thurs. at 7:30 p.m.; Fri. and Sat. at 8:00 p.m.; matinees Sat. at 4:30 p.m. and Sun. at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 437-0600.