John Slattery and Nathan Lane
Photo: Julieta Cervantes
I suspect it will be very hard for anyone not to have a good
time at the terrific revival of “The Front Page” now at the Broadhurst Theatre.
And that’s the opinion of someone who has seen it perhaps too many times in one
version or another. Maybe in 1928 when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote
their frenetic farce about a bunch of scurrilous, cutthroat newspaper men,
audiences and critics alike were eager to respond to the play’s steady stream
of improbable, implausible action and it calculatingly rough language.
In today’s world, half the dialogue would be considered
either offensive, off-limits or politically incorrect. Today, however, audiences
(and I include myself) are more apt to simply marvel at the sheer mechanics of
a play that can juggle almost two dozen characters in a circus of melodramatic
skirmishes without shortchanging their purpose, identity or personality.
And when you consider that director Jack O’Brien has also
brought together some of the best characters actors in the business you can
just sit back in awe while you laugh your head off for two and one-half rip-roaring
hours. I’ve seen two film versions (one, a distaff variation “His Girl Friday”
with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant ) and a number of stage revivals including
a splendid musical adaptation “Windy City” that played the Paper Mill Playhouse
in 1984. As intended, they were all grating, over emphatic and absolutely
sensational in their own way.
So what is it that continues to make “The Front Page” a
wonderful show? I don’t really know except to start with what we’ve got right
now. O’Brien has found the perfect balance between outright lunacy and lampooned
life, as he permits the play to speed along on its brakeless, often reckless
course to who-cares-where. We are suddenly in an unscrupulous journalistic
world that comes alive with paradoxical insidiousness.
True, the slam-bang comings and goings in the seedy newsroom
within a Chicago criminal court building more often suggests the antics in a
Feydeau farce than the scenario for a quasi-realistic peek into the fourth
estate. But in each sharply drawn character there is a natural pulse that never
betrays the comedy nor compromises the darker reality of the play.
One amazing achievement is that John Slattery, as big shot
reporter Hildy Johnson, gives us a cynical mercenary character with whom to
empathize. No cheap laughs with Slattery as he plies his matured arrogance and
expertise against a roomful of disarmingly self-serving vultures. As Johnson’s
on-again, off-again boss Walter Burns, Nathan Lane virtually dominates the
second and third acts (yes three and you need them to slow down your increasing
pulse rate) with a towering, comical portrayal of a hungry managing editor
whose insincerity is second to his almost barbarous ethics.
In spite of the play’s impenetrable convolutions, nothing
could be less important than the plot which toys with the traumas of an escaped
murdered, a hooker with a heart of gold, a pair of crooked politicians
(What?????), a distressed fiancee and her mother and a policeman who theorizes
naively on criminal psychology.
The memorable scene between the mayor (Dann Florek) and the
sheriff (John Goodman) which shifts the balance of powers of officialdom from
one to the other is a classic depiction of moronic incompetency. And when the
mayor tries to buy the loyalty of a feather-brained messenger (as punctuated
with hilarious spurts of vacuous responsiveness by the sublime Robert Morse)
with a job offer of dubious distinction, you can hardly hear the dialogue over
the laughter.
Halley Feiffer and Holland Taylor are splendid respectively
as the nonplused fiancee and her mother who unwittingly becomes embroiled in
the chaos. Standout among the otherwise hard-as-nails reporters is Jefferson
Mays, who, as the effete, hypochondriacal columnist garners plenty of howls
spraying his phone with antiseptic and stoically bearing the brunt of his
colleagues derisions. We happily bear the brunt of a comedy that takes no
prisoners...and makes no excuses for laughing at a world that was once clearly
black and white and (fill in the blank) all over.
"The Front Page" (through February 5, 2017)
Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th Street
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