No one was exactly clamoring for a revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite. This triptych of one-act comedies probably seemed old-fashioned upon its original 1968 Broadway production, and certainly comes across that way in the stilted 1971 film version starring Walter Matthau. But major-league performers demand star vehicles, creaky as they may be, in the often-mistaken belief that they can bring them back to life through sheer star power.
Hence the new production of Simon’s play, starring real-life husband and wife Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in the roles originally played onstage by the formidable George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton. Unfortunately, these likable actors only intermittently infuse comic dynamism into the dated work which needed a firmer directorial stamp than the one applied by actor John Benjamin Hickey, here making his Broadway staging debut. When a Neil Simon play gets its biggest laugh by unveiling a character’s garish plaid pants, you know that something’s not working.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
All three plays, which take place in 1968/1969, are set in Room 719 at New York’s venerable Plaza Hotel. The evening begins with the serio-comic Visitor from Mamaroneck, in which a long-married couple, Karen (Parker) and Sam (Broderick), are spending the night. Karen thinks she’s there to celebrate the couple’s 23rd or 24th wedding anniversary — it’s a subject of debate between them — in the same room where they spent their honeymoon. Except, according to Sam, it’s not the same room, which provides a hint of the domestic discord soon to be unveiled.
Sam, who’s only there because their house is being painted, makes it immediately clear that he has to work that night, offering to buy Karen a ticket to a Broadway show so she can entertain herself. But she suspects, quite rightly, that he’s having an affair with his much younger secretary (Molly Ransom). The resulting charged encounter reveals that the marriage is indeed on its last legs.
The play reveals Simon working in a darker, more serious tone that he would soon expand upon with such works as The Gingerbread Lady and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, albeit still featuring many of the comic one-liners that had become his trademark. But it mainly falls flat here, due to seriously sluggish pacing and Broderick’s stodgy performance as a vain, pompous businessman. Parker gives it her all, garnering laughs with her character’s rueful asides and generating pathos with her character’s middle-aged vulnerability. But her strenuous efforts are mostly for naught.
The second act’s two short comedies work better, thanks to their strictly humorous approach. But Visitor from Hollywood has aged badly with its sketch-like depiction of the reunion of two high-school sweethearts many years later. Jesse (Broderick) has gone on to become a big-shot movie producer, living in Humphrey Bogart’s old house and currently in town to line up Lee Marvin to star in his next project. Muriel, by contrast, is a bored New Jersey housewife with three kids who has eagerly kept up with Jesse’s movie career and has come to see him in the hotel for a quick visit. Jesse clearly has his mind bent on seduction, asking the hotel operator to hold all calls and attempting to ply Muriel with alcohol immediately upon her arrival. She’s resistant to his advances at first, but it’s soon clear from her eager inquiries about his life in Hollywood and his famous friends that she’s wavering in her fidelity. Again, Broderick proves unconvincing as an alpha male type, leaving Parker to do the heavy lifting with her perfectly timed comic delivery and energetic physicality. But what might have seemed ribald fun in the late ’60s now comes across as more than a little creepy in the MeToo era.
Visitor from Forest Hills goes for pure farce with its depiction of a middle-aged couple’s efforts to coax their daughter Mimsey (Ranson) out of the bathroom in which she’s locked herself just as her wedding ceremony downstairs is about to start. Although silly to the extreme, the sketch scores the desired laughs, with Broderick finally mustering some raucous energy to match his co-star and happily engaging in such physical comedy as fruitlessly attempting to knock down a door with his body and getting drenched by a thunderstorm while walking precariously on a seventh-story ledge.
Ultimately, the production — given a lavish stamp with John Lee Beatty’s elegant set, Jane Greenwood’s period-perfect costumes, Tom Watson’s amusingly elaborate wigs, and Marc Shaiman’s original music — merely accentuates the fact that Simon’s brand of humor has aged badly. Broderick and Parker’s star power may bring in crowds willing to pay top dollar to see them in person, but it’s more a victory of marketing than theatricality.
