The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column today to report on two important New York revivals, You Can’t Take It With You and Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nothing dates faster than a joke, so it’s always worth reflecting on why certain stage comedies from an earlier time have aged well. “You Can’t Take It With You,” the Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman play about a Depression-era family of full-bore eccentrics, opened on Broadway in 1936, ran there for 838 performances and continues to be performed regularly by students and amateurs, though the size of its 19-person cast makes professional revivals too costly to be common. Now it’s back on Broadway for the first time since 1984 in a version directed by Scott Ellis and starring James Earl Jones—and it’s still funny….
Kaufman and Hart invented or perfected many of the now-formulaic devices that power TV sitcoms, and one of them, the crazy family with a single sane member, is displayed to well-tooled effect in the saga of the Vanderhofs, whose contentedly haphazard daily lives are concisely summed up in the first paragraph of the stage directions: “This is a house where you do as you like, and no questions asked.” No less seductive, though, is the fantasy that they collectively embody: Not only do they follow their bliss to the uttermost limits of absurdity, but the rent gets paid and the pantry filled without their having to hold down nine-to-five jobs…
This revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” will likely hit big, and up to a point it deserves to do so, since it’s thoroughly good-humored and is performed with zesty energy. But it’s flawed nonetheless, mainly because Mr. Ellis has encouraged his cast to be self-consciously wacky, having forgotten, as he also did in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2012 revival of “Harvey,” that the characters in a farce don’t know they’re funny….
“Indian Ink,” Tom Stoppard’s 1995 play about the effects of colonialism on the inner lives of an English poetess (Romola Garai) and an Indian artist (Firdous Bamji), is currently receiving its first high-profile New York production courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company, which has mounted it Off Broadway as a pendant to the upcoming Broadway revival of Mr. Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.” It’s a provocative character study, though the past-meets-present double-helix structure feels at times like a rough draft for Mr. Stoppard’s “Arcadia.”…
Carey Perloff, who also directed the 1999 U.S. premiere of “Indian Ink” at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, has done right by a tricky script. Likewise her cast, well led by Mr. Bamji, Ms. Garai and Rosemary Harris, who is superlatively good…
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Indian Ink: