For a day or so before seeing the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of ‘The Man Who Came To Dinner’ at the newly-minted American Airlines Theatre on 42nd Street – a very fitting venue – I wondered if it watching the Warner Brothers 1941 film mightn’t have been a bad idea. The revival of this 1939 comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart had garnered a poor review in the Times, and it was hard to imagine how anyone, even Nathan Lane, could rival Monty Woolley, a classmate of Cole Porter’s at Yale who gave up teaching acting in 1936 to go on the stage himself. I’d read that even Alexander Woollcott, the radio snake-charmer who inspired the title character, didn’t do as well at it, when he gave the role a try in a California production. Even more, the movie had brought out the hugely dated quality of the play’s repartee. If names were coconuts, Sheridan Whiteside and his chums would all die of concussions, but not many people today really know much about the Khedive of Egypt or Dorothy de Frasso or Schiaparelli. It’s been a very long time since the Normandie plied the seas or Hattie Carnegie her gowns. There may very well have been people in the theatre who had never heard of Katharine Cornell.
The movie did beat the play at production values. More than just sets and lighting, ‘production values’ signifies everything in a show that isn’t (a) story or (b) starpower. It definitely includes the character and supporting actors whose names never make it to the marquee (no matter how beloved they might become of thoughtful audiences), and even more the direction that those actors are given. Hands down, Warner’s ‘Man’ has a better supporting cast than the Roundabout’s. With nearly thirty stage roles, it’s easy to see why the Roundabout might have to settle for talent at the level of a first-rate high school production. But I suspect that Jerry Zaks’s direction had something to the mediocrity that dragged throughout the first act. In any case, the actors playing Ohioans were even more outdone by the stars than their characters should have been.
There are five juicy parts in ‘The Man Who Came To Dinner,’ and all of them are out-of-towners, town being Mesalia, Ohio. Everybody else lives in Mesalia full-time. In the movie, Billie Burke and Grant Mitchell, both supporting talents of the first order, play Sheridan Whiteside’s bedeviled hosts. Mary Wickes makes such a success of her screen her debut as a nurse that Warner’s put her to work in the same kind of role, this time even sassier, in ‘Now, Voyager,’ a year or so later. The excellence of these three performances serves to paper over a fault line that the Roundabout revival left starkly visible. Onstage at the American Airlines Theatre, the Mesalians are not only less sophisticated than their glamorous visitors, but less interesting, too. In fact I came to share Sheridan Whiteside’s impatience with them. During the third act, when they’re very much in the background where he wants them, the show finally took off.
‘The Man Who Came To Dinner’ is two plays in one. The first is an entertainment reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s plays, built entirely upon shocking remarks. More a revue than a drama, it stars Sheridan Whiteside, internationally famous radio charlatan, marooned in Mesalia after a nasty fall on the ice. His insults, even at this remove, still pack a wallop; two of my favorites, both directed at poor Miss Preen, are ‘Nurse Bedpan’ and ‘My Lady Nausea.’ His attending physician, an incompetent bore if there ever was one, he holds up as a poster boy for euthanasia. The immediate and unwilling audience for this presentation struggles valiantly if somewhat stupidly to react with savoir faire. What we might call the Sheridan Whiteside Show sounds like the precursor of half the sitcoms ever made; indeed, Whiteside’s slip and fall on the Stanley’s steps creates the archetypal Situation. Having specialized in backchat from the beginning, Nathan Lane is a natural in the role. Unfortunately, the actors playing his victims also seem to be naturals.
The second play stars Maggie Cutler, Whiteside’s secretary, and Lorraine Sheldon, a star of stage and screen, and here Whiteside plays a supporting role, along with the ingenu they’re after and a pair of celebrity actors who , hating Lorraine, do what they can for Maggie’s campaign. Here, too, Warner’s had it over the Roundabout, and no wonder, since Bette Davis plays Maggie in the movie pretty much to perfection. Although Davis became famous, later in her career, for a Whitesidean hardness of her own, she was still in the early forties capable of a composed softness, and she puts this to work to make herself plausible as the loyal but hardly long-suffering personal assistant of an extraordinarily self-absorbed man. On the strength of a Lincoln Center revival of ‘The Little Foxes,’ a few years ago, I venture to suggest that Stockard Channing would probably be very good at giving an entirely unexpected twist to Davis’ role. Unfortunately, Harriet Harris is not in Channing’s league. There must have been some idea of making Maggie more ‘realistically’ plain than Davis could ever be (at least without her ‘Now, Voyager’ makeup), but somewhere along the way ‘plain’ became ‘awkward.’ I’m admittedly no fan of awkwardness onstage, even the intentional kind, but even a fan must agree that it has no place in a big, complicated comedy that has to spin to stay off the ground. Again and again, Harris’s pauses, her uncertain accent, and her gawky stage presence gummed up the works. And she never once seemed plausible as a clever man’s secretary.
Harris’ performance is all the more regrettable because it dampens the efforts of her costars to launch this second play – which of course is the only real play here, for which the first one works merely as a setting, just as the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets frames the love story of Romeo and Juliet – into the stratosphere of Broadway legend. Lewis J. Stadlen, last seen (by me, that is) in another, much darker play with Nathan Lane, ‘Mizlanski/Zilinski,’ has probably rocketed himself there anyway, in a performance as Banjo, a character based on Harpo Marx, that completely effaces Jimmy Durante’s in the movie. From the moment he walks on and throws a terrified Miss Preen back in his arms to his departure with a loaded sarcophagus, Stadlen lights up the stage with such transcendent clowning that one thinks of Bill Irwin. Not far behind Stadlen is Byron Jennings, playing Beverly Carlton, a Noel Coward knockoff. Incomparably more in command of Coward’s feline self-control than Warners’ Reginald Gardiner – who’s just another ritzy English guy – Jennings seems to be stretched out on luxurious pillows of blissful self-regard even when he’s walking about the stage. He even manages to hold onto the audience while he sits down at the piano and runs through a Cowardly ballad – no small trick.
Here’s a show I’d like to see: Jean Smart’s Lorraine Sheldon faces off against Marin Mazzie’s Lilli Vanessi (of ‘Kiss Me, Kate’). Lorraine and Lilly represent a lost breed of actress, ladies who saved their real dressing up for offstage. Never appearing in public without the attentions of a French maid and a couturier, these divas inspired generations of drag acts before dying, presumably, of sheer theatricality. As grandes dames, they’re wholly bogus. Curiously, it’s when they bare their teeth that they drop their guard – that’s what distinguishes them from real tigers like Joan Crawford. And they are easily provoked into baring their teeth. Jean Smart’s field day with as Lorraine Sheldon (“a siren of no mean talents”) unaccountably takes a while to get going; I wrote it off to her not liking her first ensemble. It’s not until she’s wearing her second outfit that she shows us what Lorraine’s all about, and the revelation comes in a small moment. It’s Christmas Eve, and the Stanley house has been upended even further to accommodate Whiteside’s traditional Christmas Eve broadcast. While Whiteside prepares offstage, Lorraine buffs her nails idly on the sofa. Aware that a sound technician is ogling her, she flirts back a little and then when he leaves actually says ‘tee hee’ with all the delight of a bad little girl. The ardent attentions of the sterner sex are, if not meat and drink then at least peanut butter and jelly. Smart cooked up a wonderful little shtick about trying to cry on cue and failing. She runs this through a couple of times, and gets good laughs for it, but the payoff comes when, genuinely moved by a treacherous compliment from Whiteside, she tears up without trying and is so pleased that she laughs. I wept.
Two things stood out for me in Nathan Lane’s performance. The first was his recital of a an aria in the key of blarney sharp & flat. Since it was omitted from the film, I insert it here, and beg the reader to imagine Mr Lane’s singular vocalise.
Whiteside. It is one of the most endearing and touching stories of our generation. One misty St. Valentine’s Eve – the year was 1901 – a little old lady who had given her name to an era, Victoria, lay dying in Windsor Castle. Maude Adams had not yet caused every young heart to swell as she tripped across the stage as Peter Pan; Irving Berlin had not yet written the first note of a ragtime rigadoon that was to set the nation’s feet a-tapping, and Elias P. Crockfield was just emerging from the State penitentiary. Destitute, embittered, cruel of heart, he wandered, on this St. Valentine’s Eve, into a little church. But there was no godliness in his heart that night, no prayer upon his lips. In the faltering twilight, Elias P. Crockfield made his way toward the poor box. With callous fingers he ripped open this poignant testimony of a simple people’s faith. Greedily he clutched at the few pitiful coins within. And then a child’s voice wavering treble broke the twilight stillness. “Please, Mr. Man,” said a little girl’s voice, “won’t you be my Valentine?” Elias P. Crockfield turned. There stood before him a bewitching little creature of five, her yellow curls cascading over her little shoulders like a golden Niagara, in her tiny outstretched hand a humble valentine. In that one crystal moment a sealed door opened in the heart of Elias P. Crockfield, and in his mind was born an idea. Twenty-five years later three thousand ruddy-cheeked convicts were gamboling on the broad lawns of the Crockfield Home, frolicking in the cool depths of its swimming pool, broadcasting with their own symphony orchestra from their own radio station. Elias P. Crockfield has long since gone to his Maker, but the little girl of the golden curls, now grown to lovely womanhood, is known as the Angel of Crockfield, for she is the wife of the warden, and in the main hall of Crockfield, between a Rembrandt and an El Greco, there hangs, in a simple little frame, a humble valentine.
Maggie. And in the men’s washroom , every Christmas Eve, the ghost of Elias P. Crockfield appears in one of the booths.
Crock indeed. The second most memorable moment was Mr Lane’s curtain call. Coming out last onto a thickly-populated stage, he held the stage with the authority of Jackie Gleason. Any insecurities that the actor might humanly feel were completely buried by satisfied authority. It’s possible that Lane doesn’t know why audiences have come to love what he does, but he does know what it is and he likes doing it well. In a way, the final curtain came down not on ‘The Man Who Came To Dinner’ but on ‘The Nathan Lane Show.’ (August 2000)
Copyright (c) 2004 Pourover Press