Out-shticked by sitcoms?
Never have I typed more painful words.
Neil Simon: Playwriting hero—hilarious, Pulitzer-snatching, inexhaustible chronicler of New York-Jewish life, love and lunacy (later, even about non-Jews beyond the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge)—to a New York-Jewish kid raised during his God-among-men grip on Broadway.
O'Neill? Miller? Some-Guy-Named-After-A-Southern-State Williams? Respectable fellas, but how great could they be if they didn't invent Oscar and Felix and "the cuckoo Pigeon Sisters"? Or rank second to Billy Shakes as most performed playwright in history?
That, happily, was then. This, sadly, is now. ... When an Odd Couple Broadway revival bows to critical chills for its freeze-dried feel. ... When his work seems not timeless, but timed out from the '60s and '70s. ... When Las Vegas Little Theatre's mounting of Simon's Brit-witted London Suite reveals the master of the smart-bomb one-liner and character-rich comic creations outwitted by increasingly sophisticated sitcoms that once could never have dreamed of equaling—or, hardy-har-har, surpassing—such a stupendous talent.
OK, so that's a stunningly simplified summation of a great artist's later-life status. And maybe it's that the third of Simon's Suites, post-Plaza and California, draining dry a vignette format he had little left to give by 1996—and structured more like episodic TV than his best works—is just one misplayed note in a symphony of critical and popular hits.
But with every halfhearted giggle I coughed up at London Suite, I couldn't escape an uncomfortable truth: I'd rather be home, enjoying contemporary, sophisticated sitcomery like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sex and the City, Entourage and Arrested Development, or reruns of Frasier, Seinfeld, Friends and Cheers, which took a widely ridiculed TV form from clumsy finger-painting to brushstroke art. You can't gaze upon the arguable genius of their creators—Larry David, James Brooks, Jimmy Burrows, the Brothers Charles (Glen and Les), Steven Levitan, Darren Star, Doug Ellin, Marta Kauffman, Kevin Bright, the late David Angell—and not see Simon's piquant spirit suffused throughout. And that renders LVLT's production mondo-bittersweet.
The cast and director Frank Mengwasser give us a bit of a bumpy ride, but Simon's third foursome of one-acts set in the same hotel suite proves the tread is off the tire, anyway. (Though the London setting lends the quintessential New York writer an air of erudition.)
The opening playlet, about a writer (Jay C. Somers) holding a gun on his agent (Steve McMillan) who tried to abscond with his client's entire bank account, is occasionally a laugh but mostly a drone, neither much of a hostage drama or absurd comedy. One quip, however, by the agent deriding the author for never checking his investments or bothering "with mere money," smacks of a Simon throwdown, a reverse brickbat to critics who claim his prodigious output is more calculated commercialism than heartfelt art.
Closing out a generally dispiriting Act I is the story of a woman (Kate C. Lowenhar) who sets up her widowed mom (Mary O'Brien) on a blind date. Lacking any comic energy despite its solid leads, it plods along, leaping to unexpected life only when timing-blessed O'Brien rips into a rare hilarious monologue, recounting her mishap-muddled date, leaving her daughter—and us—in hilarity heaven.
Yet again, a one-liner doubles as Simon catharsis—Mom swoons, "Shakespeare, oh the plays, the sonnets, the soliloquies ... never did understand them, but oh, the language"—over his critical rep as a populist playwright.
One-Act No. 3 is by far the strongest, a seriocomic semi-sequel to a segment of California Suite, reuniting a British actress (tartly funny Barbara King) and the bisexual-"but-more-gay" ex (casually elegant McMillan) she still adores.
Simon's pithiest punch lines break out here:
He: "There's not an unflattering line on your face."
She: "They're all tucked behind my ears. From behind, I'm 86."
The piece moves gracefully into and out of dramatic territory in the only one-act that stands firmly on its own with fairly complex characters.
The finale, some slapsticky silliness about a man (Dave Miner)—already angry over losing Wimbledon tickets and about to sacrifice his suite to actor Kevin Costner—who throws his back out, and the wife, doctor and employees who bungle trying to assist him, is broadly unfunny. It suffers mainly from Miner's comedically unsubtle performance, all screams and snarls from the get-go that lay no foundation for comic sympathy. And as it's blocked, Miner mostly flat on the floor, he's invisible to some of the audience.
London Suite is scattershot shtick from the original Shtickmeister whose best shtick-com students may have finally out-shticked him.