Barefoot in the Park

Wilson and Peet

I love a good skewering of bad theatre or movies and Ben Brantley has outdone himself! This is one of the nastiest reviews I have ever read, I love it. The last few shows I have seen on B'way have been the pits and I wish I had seen reviews like this beforehand...

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February 17, 2006
THEATER REVIEW | 'BAREFOOT IN THE PARK'
Early Simon, Dressed by Mizrahi
By BEN BRANTLEY
THE mistakes begin with the wallpaper. When the curtain rises on the torturous new revival of Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park," the play's eager newlywed heroine (portrayed by Amanda Peet) is discovered applying, with laborious comic inefficiency, hypnotically striped paper to the walls of her first apartment. Not to put a damper on a young bride's early adventures in decorating, but instead of gluing on wallpaper, shouldn't she be slapping on paint? Then at least the audience would have the diversion of watching it dry.

Certainly, theatergoers deserve some form of incidental relief from the parching desert of a production that opened last night at the Cort Theater. Mr. Simon's 1963 comedy, his first Broadway smash, was a valentine to his wife Joan and to the joyful tribulations of being young, untried and uninhibited in the big city. Yet for a work that celebrates the liberating force of spontaneity, this version doesn't have one scene that feels organic, let alone impromptu.

The quip-packed dialogue that is Mr. Simon's signature registers here with the animation and full-bodiedness of projected supertitles. As the current Broadway revival of "The Odd Couple" indicates, early Neil Simon retains its original freshness about as well as sushi. But as miscast and uneasy as this season's "Odd Couple" is, it at least has the momentum that comes from honoring the Ping-Pong rhythms of bouncing zingers. "Barefoot" progresses with the stiff-legged, robotic gait of Boris Karloff as the Mummy.

Given the vitality of the talents involved here, it may seem puzzling that this "Barefoot" should be so lacking in the sap of life. Its director, Scott Elliott, has established himself in the past decade as an inspired rejuvenator of post-mid-20th-century period pieces (including the recent "Hurlyburly" and "Abigail's Party"). Ms. Peet is a rising film star who was seen to fine advantage last year in the Public Theater's production of Neil LaBute's "This Is How It Goes." Patrick Wilson has been wonderfully appealing both onstage ("The Full Monty") and on television ("Angels in America"), while Jill Clayburgh and Tony Roberts arrive in a cloud of happy associations with now-classic films, like "An Unmarried Woman" (Ms. Clayburgh) and a clutch of top-drawer Woody Allen movies (Mr. Roberts).

Yet if you look at these folks' credentials and personas more closely, you'll see that most of them are flagrantly mismatched with their roles, including, by the way, Mr. Elliott. But let's start — though I'm loath to — with Ms. Peet, since her character, Corie Bratter, is the soul of the play.

Originated on Broadway by the young (and by all accounts irresistible) Elizabeth Ashley, and on film in 1967 by an improbably kittenish Jane Fonda, Corie is the heir to the screwball heroines of the 1930's — logically illogical, life-intoxicated women (played by the likes of Colbert, Lombard and Katharine Hepburn) who taught uptight men to get down and cut loose. Mr. Simon was, in fact, resuscitating a type that had mostly disappeared in the 40's and 50's and establishing a mold for the countercultural blithe spirits of the 60's and 70's that Goldie Hawn would make a career of.

Not that Corie is a revolutionary. She is proud to be Mrs. Paul Bratter, and her first desire is to make her new hubby (Mr. Wilson), a fledgling lawyer, a happy home. Yet she is a wild thing, too, whose idea of a good time is to get drunk and ring all the neighbors' doorbells, sample crazy foreign food and, yes, run barefoot in the park in the dead of winter. As her mother, Mrs. Banks (Ms. Clayburgh), a timid suburban widow, tells her: "You're impulsive. You jump into life."

Ms. Peet, to put it bluntly, is no jumper. She exudes the bristly, defensive caution of a pretty woman used to fending off the advances of creeps. And her range of vocal and facial expressiveness is pretty much confined to, at most, two lines of a musical staff. In the right part, she can work subtle wonders within these limitations. But her Corie seems as madcap as Martha Stewart in a business meeting. You can sense that she's trying, really hard, to be funny and freewheeling, but it hurts her. Us, too.

This doesn't give Mr. Wilson's priggish Paul, who must be seduced by Corie into shedding his buttoned-down ways, much to work with. "Is that supposed to be funny?" he asks Corie, after she delivers a typically Simonian put-down. "No, it was supposed to be nasty," she answers. "It just came out funny." But in truth, there is no appreciable difference between this Corie's being funny and being nasty; there's not even much difference between her hysterically sad and hysterically happy.

Even playing opposite an emotional vacuum, Mr. Wilson, in the role created on stage and screen by Robert Redford, manages some appealing bits of comic business, as the fastidious Paul deals with the broken-down obstacle course that is his Greenwich Village apartment. But there's an artificiality in his line readings and gestures, however charming, that suggests that he developed them in front of a mirror. You can't blame him.

Ms. Clayburgh has a winning way with dialogue that can make synthetic one-liners sound like filigree epigrams. Trim and dazzlingly blond, she is a glamorous eyeful in Isaac Mizrahi's rich dowager costumes. Then again, her character is supposed to be a shy, delicate frump in need of sexual awakening. Nothing that is said about Mrs. Banks tracks with what we see of her here.

The role of the Bohemian womanizer next door is one Mr. Roberts could glide through on automatic pilot. He does. Like the rest of the cast, he has been painstakingly outfitted by Mr. Mizrahi in clothing that screams, "It's the 1960's, folks." (In Mr. Roberts's case, this means Birkenstocks and a brocade Nehru jacket.)

This is part and parcel of Mr. Elliott's shtick; he has always been big on time-capsule details. His "Barefoot" comes equipped with a vintage (and sometimes anachronistic) soundtrack that ranges from Petula Clark singing "Downtown" to the Byrds' cover of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" And by the second scene, after Corie has finished decorating, Derek McLane's village-aerie walk-up apartment set could have been ripped from the pages of an early-1960's Better Homes and Gardens.

Is this really what Corie, the raging individualist, would come up with? Perhaps Mr. Elliott is trying to suggest that Corie is, after all, her mother's daughter, trapped in the conventions she grew up with. But "Barefoot in the Park" does not stand up to such psychological parsing. For it to work at all, it has to float without flinching on the surface of its wide-eyed, good-willed romanticism.

Only one of the performers here seems to enter fully and happily into that spirit. His name is Adam Sietz, and he has a small role as a wisecracking but empathetic telephone installer. He is onstage for a total of perhaps 10 minutes. And those are the only minutes in which this show exhales the breath of life.

Barefoot in the Park

By Neil Simon; directed by Scott Elliott; set by Derek McLane; costumes by Isaac Mizrahi; lighting by Jason Lyons; sound by Ken Travis; production stage manager, Valerie A. Peterson; props coordinator, Kathy Fabian; production manager, Showman Fabricators; general manager, Roy Gabay; associate producers, Leah and Ed Frankel, CJ Entertainment/URL Productions, Stephen Kocis and Oliver Dow. Presented by Robyn Goodman, Mr. Gabay, Walt Grossman, Geoff Rich, Danzansky Partners, Ergo Entertainment and Ruth Hendel, in association with Paramount Pictures. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

WITH: Amanda Peet (Corie Bratter), Patrick Wilson (Paul Bratter), Jill Clayburgh (Corie's mother, Mrs. Banks), Tony Roberts (Victor Velasco), Adam Sietz (telephone repairman) and Sullivan Walker (deliveryman).



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