TT: Don’t shoot the playwright

I review three shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Two are on Broadway, All My Sons and To Be or Not to Be, and both are doubleplusungood. Not so the Cleveland Play House’s revival of Noises Off, which I liked enormously. Here’s an excerpt.
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Everything that Arthur Miller was to become can be seen in embryo in “All My Sons,” his first hit, which ran for nine months on Broadway in 1947 and has now returned there in a revival graced–if that’s the word–by the presence of Katie Holmes. Earnest and hectoring, “All My Sons” is as much a secular sermon as a play, a school-of-Ibsen indictment of the moral emptiness of the American bourgeoisie, always a draw for guilt-wracked playgoers who enjoy being flagellated at $100 a pop. Unlike the plays that followed it, however, “All My Sons” is for the most part satisfyingly unpretentious, a next-to-no-nonsense wartime tragedy about a corrupt factory owner (John Lithgow) whose greed leads to the suicide of his soldier son, and it deserves better than this windy production, in which Simon McBurney commits first-degree directorial malpractice.
Mr. McBurney is the artistic director of Complicité, a British avant-garde theater troupe whose work I admire. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has used “All My Sons” as a vehicle for his multi-media prestidigitation: Newsreel-style rear projections, thunderous sound effects and spooky incidental music are seen and heard throughout the evening, while Tom Pye’s minimalist set looks as though it were designed for an opera by Philip Glass. But while this trickery might well have been impressive if deployed in the service of one of Complicité’s surreal spectacles, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the modest exercise in kitchen-sink naturalism that is “All My Sons,” and Miller’s script all but disappears under the weight of Mr. McBurney’s staging….
Like most of the pretty young screen things who have made Broadway debuts in recent seasons, Ms. Holmes is a creature of the camera who doesn’t know the first thing about stage acting. Anyone misguided enough to make her professional stage debut on Broadway opposite Mr. Lithgow and Ms. Wiest in an Arthur Miller play is, of course, asking for trouble, and Ms. Holmes gets it in spades….
Ernst Lubitsch never made a funnier movie than “To Be or Not to Be,” in which Jack Benny played a second-rate Polish actor who bamboozles the Nazis in spite of himself. Why, then, attempt to turn so well-made a work of cinematic art into a stage play? A musical, maybe, but Nick Whitby’s adaptation, which takes the script of the 1942 film and pumps it full of new punch lines and a semi-serious ending, makes no sense at all–not least because none of Mr. Whitby’s jokes is even slightly funny….
“Noises Off,” first seen on Broadway in 1983, consists of a rehearsal and two performances of “Nothing On,” a not-so-hot British sex comedy acted by a calamity-prone touring troupe. The gimmick of the show is that the set is turned around for the second act, allowing us to witness the disastrous backstage occurrences from the actors’ point of view. The result is a metafarce–a farce whose subject matter is farce itself. Neeedless to say, so complicated a conceit cannot possibly be made to work without pristinely immaculate craftsmanship, but “Noises Off” fills the bill. Once the nine doors of James Leonard Joy’s two-story set start slamming, the laughter starts swelling in a crescendo so protracted that it’s a wonder people don’t faint in the aisles from sheer exhaustion.
David H. Bell, the director of this production, is a specialist in musical comedy who doubles as a choreographer, which may help to explain the miraculous exactitude with which he has staged “Noises Off.” Every comic bomb goes off at the right split-second….
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Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review here: