Making most of season
Comedy, drama both captivate auds in NYC
Who wouldn't laugh at the Broadway revival of "Noises Off"? (Perhaps one should speak of laughing with the production, since the only show I actually laughed at was the unendurable "Summer of '42.")
As someone who fondly recalls Michael Blakemore's Broadway premiere of "Noises" nearly two decades ago, I approached the Brooks Atkinson Theater with a trepidation that, happily, turned out to be unfounded.
Reprising a play he has directed in London, Jeremy Sams has cleverly cast the New York production to subvert our memories, however treasured: Yes, Dorothy Loudon and Patti LuPone -- the two productions' Dotty Otleys -- were both musical stars, but the two women are entirely different presences.
LuPone's brief act-two sendup of her own Norma Desmond drew belly laughs from the handful of theater insiders at the matinee I caught. And in a class of its own: LuPone's repeated delivery of the word "Spain," which seems to spiral up and out of her mouth as she is saying it.
As for the director within the play, the battle-scarred Lloyd Dallas (played by Peter Gallagher), I doubt "Noises Off" has ever had a "helmer" quite so floppy-haired, leather-jacketed, libidinous and fresh-faced -- a British Young Turk.
Announcing to his hapless company that he is putting "all my studies in world drama at your disposal," Gallagher projects the delicious air of an errant talent who can't quite believe the professional (not to mention sexual) stew in which he has landed.
A wonderful actor with a spot-on British accent, Gallagher was making his Broadway name in the original New York production of "The Real Thing" about the time "Noises Off" first played Manhattan, and he has been too infrequent a stage presence in the years since. And I don't think I've ever previously encountered T.R. Knight, the production's other surprise (I'd been told Katie Finneran would be great, and she was, though so was Deborah Rush). In a play largely about mechanics and precision timing, Knight's woebegone air gives the production a burst of heart, not to mention finding heretofore unheard syllables in the Suffolk town of Lowestoft.
Anyone would particularly appreciate "Noises Off" if they've ever sat through "When Did You Last See Your Trousers?," "I Can't Find My Knickers" (ah, those were the days) and the like. But regardless, the audience emerged into the crisp late-afternoon air wreathed in smiles, the show's comic depiction of insanity the perfect antidote to our insane times.
But it's frustrating when a New York audience goes into a theater determined to laugh, whether or not the show demands it. This is where Kate Burton and Ian McKellen provide such an intriguing study in contrasts. Sporting an irritating laugh, Burton's Hedda Gabler -- like the production as a whole -- seems so intent on domesticating a now-mythic character and play that it reduces Ibsen's endlessly subtle drama into a vapid sitcom. (When even the usually exemplary Harris Yulin isn't registering, you know something's wrong.)
The season's other Scandinavian reclamation (we'll leave out "Mamma Mia!" for the moment), "Dance of Death" has been staged with far greater flair (perhaps a mannerism or two too many) but it too risks laughs, including pretty much anything said by David Strathairn's colorless and buffoonish Kurt: "We are the two unhappiest people on earth" practically brought down the house.
Thank heavens, then, for a baleful and sexy Helen Mirren and, especially, Ian McKellen, the latter one of those English actors (Maggie Smith is another) who can elicit laughs on cue and seconds later knock an audience into respectful silence. There's more than a touch of his erstwhile Richard III (the sagging arm, for one thing) to McKellen's perf as Edward, the army captain going none too quietly AWOL in some isolated outpost. (Question: How has Eric Martin Brown's ceaselessly pacing yet wordless Sentry kept up his own attention during the run?)
But for all the audience-pleasing bravado of McKellen's star performance -- sliding down a banister one minute, letting fly with his inimitable vocal trills the next -- Sir Ian taps into the enduring gravity of Strindberg's play that exists entirely separately from its affinities to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and the like.
I doubt it's simply because death has been so literally in the air in New York that McKellen more often than not induced an almost fearsome hush, whether via a question ("What if the end isn't only that?") or, an act later, confessing, "I have looked death in the eye; life seems different now." And so, of course, does "Dance of Death," which may be no less crucial a play for New York at the moment than, in its way, is "Noises Off": Laughter can be catharsis, yes, but as McKellen has traveled to America to prove, grief and pain can be, too.
