Bardly comedy and Nazi tragedy
In the amusing, feather-light To Be or Not to Be, a world-premiere comedy that opened last night on Broadway, there's a little of everything and it all adds up to a modest whole.
NEW YORK - In the amusing, feather-light
To Be or Not to Be
, a world-premiere comedy that opened last night on Broadway, there's a little of everything and it all adds up to a modest whole.
There's madcap stuff - the lunatic plans of a jaunty Polish acting troupe to rescue underground fighters as Germany occupies their nation in 1939. There's Shakespeare, put to the use of the plot. There are disguises and deception and a full dose of the camaraderie people form in dangerous times. And there are theater jokes aplenty.
The classically constructed plot by British playwright Nick Whitby bears seeds that flower into big laugh lines later and, at one point, a throwaway line about a piece of stage makeup that is key when a main character seems doomed.
Funny as it is, I couldn't help wondering if the question in To Be or Not to Be is: Is that all there is? The possibilities that we care about its characters, or their growing plights that come from capers of their own devising, diminish as the play progresses. Maybe it's that the comedy is set against the horrible sweep of Nazi Germany and - well, there seems to be a lot more to worry about than these misguided actors. Even if they are pretty funny.
That said, everything but a slightly overactive snow machine, which drops flakes even in indoor scenes, works to a fine-tuned hum in the Manhattan Theatre Club production. The comedy plays on the company's Broadway stage - the renamed Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, after the legendary Broadway publicist; until this season, it was more easily the Biltmore.
The play is taken from Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 movie of the same title, starring the unlikely duo of Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, and with a young Robert Stack. It was remade in 1983 with the famously unlikely duo of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks.
On stage, its leads - a husband/wife team who fancy themselves as great Polish thespians and whose most challenging acting will be in front of the Nazis - are the charming David Rasche and Jan Maxwell, who bounce around their peccadilloes as if they were on playground equipment.
The rest of the cast, under the fluent direction of Casey Nicholaw (The Drowsy Chaperone, Spamalot), is equally up to the task - particularly Michael McCarty as a Nazi colonel, whose demeanor is outwardly avuncular and inside, barbaric. Robert Dorfman's intentionally hammy Jewish actor is on the mark, and so are Steve Kazee as an earnest Polish air pilot and Kristine Nielsen as the actors' den momma. (She's so natural in the role, she's a pleasure to watch.)
Anna Louizos' set neatly transforms from a dilapidated theater to the elegant Nazi headquarters, as a billowing curtain passes in front. Two different sorts of film projections flash onto the moving curtain: visual jokes that relate to the plot, or real scenes from the invasion of Poland. For me, the fun of the former was overpowered by the reality of the latter throughout.