Simonizing

Neil Simon has got to be the most successful contemporary playwright Broadway has ever known. From the early 60s to the early 90s, more seasons than not featured a new Doc Simon hit. (By my count, there were 26 new productions, including musicals, and an astounding 17 hits.)

For the last 15 years, though, his new work--and even revivals--haven't clicked. So people have been watching closely the latest revival of one of his biggest hits, Brighton Beach Memoirs, to see if he can still mean something on the Geat White Way.

I saw the original production, starring Matthew Broderick, on a Wednesday matinee. I got cheap seats in the balcony, and was surrounded by a bunch of old theatre ladies, who sighed when, before the curtain opened, big band tunes played to set the scene. (One lady also said during the second act when no resolution seemed in sight "this is so long.") It was a combination of laughs and sentiment, and I could see why it ran for three years--though I actually prefer the two follow-ups in the Eugene Jerome trilogy, which are a little sharper: Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound. (The same company doing BBM will soon be opening Broadway Bound, which features some of the same characters.)

With no big names (Laurie Metcalfe is known, but people won't buy a $100 ticket to see her) it probably needs a rave in The New York Times. Alas, Ben Brantley did not write a money review. He thinks it has its moments, and understands hot director David Cromer is going for a different approach, but it doesn't hold together for him. I think he's a bit unfair on the play:

The plot is structured with a mathematical care and precision that seemed old-fashioned even 26 years ago. (That formula is kept on life support today in some television sitcoms.) The family’s individual problems are carefully laid out; they are allowed to boil until they overflow into confrontation; and then they are resolved, at least temporarily, to everyone’s satisfaction.

First, the play is actually looser in structure than Simon's earlier work. Second, old-fashioned or not, setting up problems and then resolving them is simply good storytelling.

Brantley goes on:

The depiction of a whirling, crowded daily life — as closely packed relatives keep getting under one another’s feet while remaining firmly lodged in one another’s hearts — is part of what made “Memoirs” a hit in the early 1980s, when the ideal of the big American family had been under siege for years.

Funny, but I don't remember the big America family particularly being under seige in the early 1980s (more than at any other time in the past few decades). Anyway, why would this be a factor in its popularity? People have always liked stories about families. Broadway's longest-running non-musical ever is Life With Father, which opened in the 30s.

Other critics have been kinder to the production, but I don't know if that'll save it. For instance, this is from Variety, which likes Cromer's approach:

Hats off to the farsighted producers of "The Neil Simon Plays" for taking a risk on their choice of director. While David Cromer's most recent New York hits, "Adding Machine" and "Our Town," mined piercing depths in timeworn texts, they did so in an austere presentational style that seemed a million miles from the warm-hearted humor of "Brighton Beach Memoirs." The first installment of a Simon double that continues with "Broadway Bound," opening Dec. 10, the revival strikes an exquisite balance between comedy and pathos, its impeccable ensemble landing every laugh while exploring every emotional nuance to build a tremendously moving portrait of family life.

Now that's a money review. It goes on:

It's easy to imagine "Brighton Beach" becoming either mawkish or sitcommy in the wrong hands.

Sure is. Ben Brantley had no trouble imagining it. (This is from another review: "Cromer's particular gifts as a director are to bring even the most theatrical characters to recognizable and fully-dimensional life and to establish a particular rhythm for the world they inhabit. And here, even when Cromer must embrace the occasional over-jokiness of Simon's mostly heartfelt script, he wisely downplays the work's sitcom-like qualities to focus on the human drama." What's with you, Brantley?)

Back to Variety:

Set in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of the title in the late 1930s, in the encroaching shadow of WWII, the play's treatment of a family struggling to stay together and make ends meet resonates perhaps more now than it did in the 1980s.

I've noted this before, but when you find yourself writing something is more relevant today than it was originally, stop. This is a cliche, and almost always wrong. Anything decent about the human condition will always seem relevant, and one can invariably find something current that it relates to. Saying it's more relevant today is an insult--it almost implies you should see the play now since when things change in a few years, it'll once again be less relevant.

Anyway, the play will need good word of mouth to survive. But this is Neil Simon. He's had hits before.

PS I wrote this post a few days ago. Since then, the producers have announced they will close the show and not even open Broadway Bound. Their statement:

A lot of nice people on stage and off will be out of work and a lot of good partners and investors will have lost a great deal of money. They all deserve better. It makes us sad.

So we go from Brighton Beach to Broadway Bound to Ben Brantley. Thanks, New York Times.