Farce is not my favorite form of theater. The silly gags, the slamming doors, the broad sexual innuendo usually do nothing for me. And yet, I confess I had a laugh-out-loud good time at both the Mark Twain play Is He Dead?, which closed far too soon after just 105 performances in March; and the new British import Boeing-Boeing, which I think will get the chance to play much longer.
Boeing-Boeing is set in the early ‘60s and centers around Bernard, a stereotypical swinging bachelor who is engaged to three beautiful flight attendants and orchestrates his trysts with them according to the airline timetables (which, of course, today are often a farce themselves). When each of the women’s carriers switches to the then-new Boeing super jets, their schedules become unpredictable, they all show up at the same time and hilarious havoc ensues.
The play, written by the late Marc Camoletti, was originally produced in France (appropriately enough since that country is considered the birthplace of the art form that was perfected by Molière and Georges Feydeau). Boeing-Boeing ran for 19 years in France and is, according to the "Guinness Book of Records," still the most performed French play around the world. The Brits have been particularly crazy about it. A production opened in London in 1962 and went on to play 2,035 performances. And last year, a revival opened there and drew a fresh round of raves.
American audiences have been tougher to please. A Broadway production played just 23 performances in 1965 and a movie version later that year with Tony Curtis as Bernard, Jerry Lewis as his naïve best friend Robert and the always-wry Thelma Ritter as the housekeeper who is a reluctant accomplice in keeping the women apart also crashed. But this new production, which opened last week at the Longacre Theatre, seems to have achieved lift-off. Most of the reviews have been filled with lofty praise and yesterday the show won six Tony nominations including Best Revival of a Play, Matthew Warchus for Direction, Rob Howell for Costume Design, Simon Baker for Sound Design, Mary McCormack for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and Mark Rylance for Best Actor.
Rylance, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor who was the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London for 10 years (click here to see an excerpt from an excellent New Yorker profile of him) is the only import from the British production and his comedically brilliant performance as the unworldly Robert anchors the show. But everyone in the production works hard (click here to see excerpts from the show). Rob Howell’s cartoon-colored and mini-skirted uniforms for the stewardess draw laughs all by themselves and Howell, who also did the set, has create a perfectly modish backdrop for the de rigueur slamming doors. Although McCormack deserved her nomination for the daffy German fiancée, Gina Gershon and Kathryn Hahn as her Italian and American counterparts are also giddy delights. The choreographer Kathleen Marshall was reportedly even brought in to stage the "Laugh-In"- style curtain call; the first time I can remember anyone being credited with that job.
Sometimes the sweat shows. Bradley Whitford of TV’s “The West Wing” literally climbs the walls to get his laughs as Bernard and Christine Baranski summons every ounce of her trademark deadpan drollery to make the role of the housekeeper work even though, as my regular theatergoing buddy Bill observed, she’s far too chic for the part (Rhea Perlman played the role in London). But in the end, the audience—even the farce-adverse like me—is forgiving because everyone on stage seems to be having such a good time and to be so genuinely intent on making us have one too.
Of course I was in a good mood even before I got to the Longacre because Bill and I had dinner at Sardi’s with my fellow bloggers Steve of Steve on Broadway and Esther of Gratuitous Violins, who were in town to catch up on some shows. As you’d expect, much of the conversation was taken up with theater gossip (we were all still scratching out heads about what had convinced its producers to bring the universally panned and instantly closed Glory Days to Broadway) and what we’d recently seen (Steve had just returned from London where he’d seen the much-scorched Gone with the Wind; click here to read his review). It was a few days after Esther’s birthday and so we celebrated that too, complete with a serenade from the Sardi’s waiters.
Then, Steve and Esther went off to see Macbeth (also a multi-Tony nominee) while Bill and I headed for Boeing-Boeing. “I wish we were seeing Boeing-Boeing,” Esther had confided in one of the emails we exchange before meeting. It wasn’t, of course, that she doesn’t appreciate a good tragedy. But anyone who knows actors or even has read deeply about them knows that even the most serious thespians would trade their first born for the challenge of a good comedy role. “Dying is easy,” goes the saying. “Comedy is hard.” The folks in Boeing-Boeing don’t quite make it look easy but they do make it fun to go along for the ride.
If there were a Tony Award for Best Ensemble (and why isn't there one?) it would be the most competitive race this Broadway season. The frontrunner probably would be the Steppenwolf gang from August: Osage County. And not far behind would be the merrymakers of Is He Dead? and the lethal quintet in The Homecoming. But I'd cast my vote for the brilliant band of actors in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer. The cast—Jim Norton, Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon (standing in the photo above), David Morse and Ciarán Hinds—is listed alphabetically in the Playbill, the actors come out together for the curtain call and it's hard to set a hierarchy on their uniformly superb performances. Like the members of a crew team, each man grabs his oars and, working together as a single unit skillfully steered by McPherson who directs his own play, they transport the audience into an engrossing evening of theater.
It's a particularly impressive feat because their vehicle, the play with its fanciful twists, isn't quite as sturdy as one might hope. Like The Weir and last season's Shining City, The Seafarer is another one of McPherson's ghost stories. The Dublin-born playwright has the Irishman's love of a good yarn and he is a great raconteur. But at the end of each of his plays I've seen, I found myself asking, So what was that about? The critics, whose reviews I'd saved and read when I got home, also seemed confused by The Seafarer's meaning and divided on whether or not it was a really good play or just a good time.
At its simplest, The Seafarer is about a ne'er do-well (Morse) who returns home during the Christmas season to take care of his brother (Norton) who was blinded when he got so drunk that he fell into a dumpster. Two local friends (Hill and Mahon) drop by and a mysterious man (Hinds) whom one of them met at a local bar joins the group. There is much drinking, much storytelling some gambling (metaphorical and literal) and inquisitions into the meaning of good and evil, the nature of heaven and hell. Souls are imperiled and salvation is sought. There are also lots and lots of laughs. The great actor Brian Dennehy was sitting in front of my friend Bill and me and he laughed so hard that he doubled over at times, a good thing since he's a huge man who, at times, blocked Bill's view.
You wouldn't know this just from watching the play, unless maybe you were a particularly wonky English major in college, but I learned from the articles and reviews I read afterwards that the title of the play apparently refers to an old English poem of the same name. And even a quick perusal of the poem seems to provide some clues as to what McPherson may be getting at. "Death leaps at the fools who forget their God," goes one line (click here to read the entire poem).
It's odd when you think about it but religious faith isn't often the subject of a Broadway show. A photo of Jesus hangs on the back wall of The Seafarer’s set and right at the start of the play, the returning brother almost absent-mindedly lights a small votive candle in front of it. The flame seemed to flicker on and off throughout the performance Bill and I saw. I don't know if that was intentional or not but right before the final lights dimmed, it glowed.
How can you not like Mark Twain? His novels, particularly the great “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, were bestsellers in their day and progenitors of the Great American novel, and they're still smart and funny. He was a devoted father, an adoring husband and a great raconteur with a wide circle of friends and an international following. He had an iconic sense of style and an innate sense of decency. Of course, like everyone, he had his faults; his was being notoriously bad at managing money but even then, he was the kind of guy who, when he went bankrupt, paid back all his debts even though it took him years to do it. After reading his biography a couple of years ago, I developed a crush on him.
Still, I had my doubts about seeing the new Broadway production of Is He Dead?, the play that Twain wrote in 1898, but that was never produced and that was pretty much lost until a Stanford English professor discovered it in an archive five years ago. But I was curious too and so last week, I went with my friend Ann, a good sport who is up for any adventure, to see it. Hedging our bet, we had pre-show burgers at Angus McIndoe, the Broadway hangout that almost always guarantees a good time. Then, we crossed over to the east side of Broadway to get to the gorgeous old Lyceum Theatre where Is He Dead? is playing and where, it turns out, we had an even better time.
Is He Dead? isn't a great play but, as adapted by David Ives, directed by Michael Blakemore, and performed by a wonderfully game cast, it is great fun. Twain's tale takes the life of Jean-François Millet, a real-life 19th century French artist, and reimagines what would have happened if the impoverished painter had faked his own death in order to sell his works to a fickle public that only seems to appreciate artists when they're dead. The result is a farce filled with mistaken identities, cross dressing characters, mustachioed villains, clueless foreigners, silly jokes, sight gags and, of course, lots of slamming doors.
Ives, who has retrofitted 19 musicals for the Encores! series, and Blakemore, who directed the original production of the classic Noises Off and knows his way around a farce, whip all of these elements into a delightful confection that deftly captures the Twain aesthetic. There are also terrific performances from Byron Jennings, David Patu and Marylouise Burke. But the show's secret ingredient is its star, Norbert Leo Butz.
The funny thing is I wasn't all that impressed with Butz the first time I saw him, as the cute boy toy both witches wanted in Wicked. But I was knocked out by his Tony-award winning performance as the manic con man in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; and he was even more hilarious when Jonathan Pryce joined the cast and the two seemed to push one another to dizzier heights of do-anything-for-a-laugh zaniness. Like Nathan Lane, whose comic brilliance often improves the roles he plays, Butz seems to work best when there's room for him to let his talents fly without restraints. Ives and Blakemore have cleared the decks for him and Butz is more delightfully antic than he's ever been, the play is better than it should have been and the audience is more entertained than it thought it could have been.
Historians speculate about why Is He Dead? was never produce during Twain's lifetime. Here's my thesis: Twain, a man with a great respect for the power of humor and a popular lecturer who drew thousands to his talks, knew what it took to be a crowd-pleaser and so he simply waited until an actor came along who could make his play one. And, of course, as he knew, death makes no difference, it just makes us appreciate his artistry more.
Farce is not my favorite form of theater. The silly gags, the slamming doors, the broad sexual innuendo usually do nothing for me. And yet, I confess I had a laugh-out-loud good time at both the Mark Twain play Is He Dead?, which closed far too soon after just 105 performances in March; and the new British import Boeing-Boeing, which I think will get the chance to play much longer. 
