theatreVOICE

I’m in New York on a flying visit and happened to catch the Manhattan transfer of Boeing-Boeing, as revived by Matthew Warchus on its opening night at the Longacre Theater, on Sunday. With so many British contenders for the dwindling American buck on the Great White Way (Goold’s Macbeth, Eyre’s Mary Poppins, Macdonald’s Top Girls - not to mention Mamma Mia!, The 39 Steps), has it entered too crowded a market to secure the affection of native New Yorkers?

The show was a flop when it first made it over the pond after a being huge hit in London, back in 1965 (it lasted a miserable 43 performances). One thing that was immediately apparent last night: if the show doesn’t make Mark Rylance - profiled in the current edition of the New Yorker - into a huge star Stateside, nothing will. Quite simply he doesn’t put a foot wrong, an eyebrow twitch awry, a worry-wrinkle astray as the Wisconsin hick Robert, who gets caught up in his old friend Bernard’s Parisian carousel of infidelity. Everything about him, from the Stan Laurel hair, to the peculiar drooping melancholy of his voice, to the way he turns on a sixpence between abject diffidence and wilting manly assertion, as he valiantly strives to ensure that Bernard’s three cross-continental air-stewardess lovers don’t collide mid-apartment, getting ever more frazzled on the way, is a comic joy to savour.

All the reviews this morning agree he is sensational, but there is a surprising divergence of opinion about the show overall. In the all-important New York Times, Ben Brantley is just wild about Rylance - likening him to Buster Keaton - and says of Warchus’s geometrically neat revisiting of Marc Camoletti’s play: ‘Boeing-Boeing.. is not a play you quote from. It’s not what people say but how they move. Though the performers have specific stage presence to burn, their characters are ultimately as abstract as figures in a ballet. You see, the appeal of Boeing-Boeing is the very opposite of what you might expect. It’s not smutty at all. It’s delicious, deliriously innocent. I haven’t felt so much like a child, watching a sex comedy since I was, well, a very young child, taken by his mother to the Billy Wilder movie Some Like It Hot. Like Wilder’s masterpiece this production levitates low burlesque into high comedy.’

Compare that with the sour-puss one-star review from the New York Post’s Clive Barnes. In a notice marked ‘Going-Going Nowhere Fast’, Barnes condemns ‘this whirligig of tired ethnic jokes and slamming doors’: ‘When I saw this revival, staged by Matthew Warchus and designed by Rob Howell, in London last summer, I thought it was terrible, but Rylance had already left the cast, and I was assured by some that he had made a terrific difference. He does make a terrific difference. And it’s still terrible - as repetitious and as tedious as a flea circus.’

In the Daily News, a more appreciative appraisal, courtesy of Joe Dziemianowicz: ‘this production from London is a breath of fresh laughing gas’ and ‘it’s nothing but blue skies and mile-high hilarity’ - and so forth.

My own feeling? That actually it would be worth the price of a return air-fair just to fly over to New York to see the show, and catch Rylance’s performance - along with those of the rest of the cast (I’ll name them all, they are all fantastic: Kathryn Hahn, Bradley Whitford, Christine Baranski, Gina Gershon, Mary McCormack). New Yorkers, in my view, should disregard Barnes’ notice, if they know what’s hilarious for them, and flock to it. I’m as averse to sycophantic first-night whoops and applause as anyone but it was genuinely astonishing that whereas the evening began on a note of artificial approval, with the audience clapping every actor’s first appearance and departure, within quarter of an hour, those ecstatic eruptions felt entirely earned. The play is at once trivial and profound - in that it touches on the way people can be driven towards extravagant behaviour by sexual need, and the urge for passion, while keeping their emotions woefully buttoned up; it counterpoints different converging aspects of masculinity - so-called alpha male and beta male behaviour - and it shows just how predatory and canny (to the point of comic caricature) women in the supposedly kittenish, gender-stereotyped Sixties could be. Whereas I could never entirely understand the fuss about The 39 Steps revival - another British hit that’s really taken root on Broadway, at the Cort; this is one (predominantly recast) import I think you’d need to have had a humour-bypass not to enjoy. Whether the cast can keep their performances at such stratospherically high levels of brilliance remains to be seen. In the meantime, hats off to them and chocks away.
At Longacre Theater 230 W 48th Street between Broadway and Eighth (212-239-6200).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 11:29 am, by Dominic Cavendish and is filed under Audio 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.