Nathan Lane Is So Funny It Hurts Esquire
Review: 'The Front Page' Is Diverting, but Don't Stop the Presses
- The Front Page
- Broadway, Comedy/Drama , Play
- 2 hrs. and 45 min.
- Closing Date:
- Broadhurst Theater, 235 W 44th St.
- 212-239-6200
"Who the hell reads the second paragraph?" snarls Walter Burns, the merciless newspaper editor in "The Front Page," examining the copy of his star reporter. And since Mr. Burns is portrayed quite spectacularly by Nathan Lane as a man whose advice you ignore at your peril, I shall state right away — with the rattling fanfare of a hundred manual typewriters — that the revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 classic, which opened on Thursday night at the Broadhurst Theater, is …
Dang it! (Imagine I just wrote something saltier.) That's way too much prose for any paragraph, never mind a lead. No doubt Walter would inform me that you, my impatient audience, have already stopped reading by now. But though "The Front Page" is all about the adrenaline rush that turns journalists into deadline junkies, it's hard to work up the proper urgency about Jack O'Brien's production.
So to finish the thought I started before I so rudely interrupted myself, the latest edition of "The Front Page" is … diverting. Pretty darn good. At moments, very funny indeed.
Its cast is filled to the gills with tabloid-worthy faces, as was the audience for its opening night (which in a rare break from recent tradition, critics attended, instead of the usual news media previews). It looks photo-op fabulous, with its augustly shabby, nicotine-stained pressroom (by Douglas W. Schmidt) and costumes (by Ann Roth). But aside from those moments when Mr. Lane is all but setting fire to the stage (as his character at one point threatens to), it is not the stuff of banner headlines.
Set in the wild and woolly Chicago of the 1920s, when men were men and newspaper men were animals, "The Front Page" is just about everybody's favorite play about journalism. It's a hyped-up, four-letter hymn to the obsessiveness of the ink-stained muckraker, a profession at which Hecht and MacArthur toiled in happy squalor in Chicago before ascending to celebrity as writers for Broadway and Hollywood.
"Loud, rapid, coarse and unfailing entertainment," Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times 88 years ago, when the play opened. He did have a caveat: "The authors have such a picturesque yarn to spin that their insistence upon thrusting bespattered conversation down the throats of the audience is as superfluous as it is unpleasant."
The mud still flies in this tale of the frenzy surrounding the imminent hanging of a police killer, although some of its nastier ethnic epithets have been modified. The problem is that in this production the dirt isn't so much slung as spun, carefully and thoughtfully, so you can trace the arc of a joke before it lands. The show is pointedly and self-consciously funny, savoring its own raucous wit, which paradoxically means that it just isn't as funny as it should be.
This may partly be a consequence of having such a relentlessly socko cast, which numbers more than two dozen. The seven names above the title alone span generations of showbiz. (In addition to Mr. Lane, they are John Slattery, John Goodman, Robert Morse, Jefferson Mays, Sherie Rene Scott and Holland Taylor). And many of the ensemble members have the grandstanding panache to solicit not only entrance but also regular exit applause.
What they only seldom achieve, though, is the sense of a professional tribe collectively hypnotized by their own high-octane mythology — moving, talking, clashing in a frenzied competitive march that holds them prisoners of its rat-a-tat rhythms. Hecht and MacArthur were able to translate those rhythms with uncanny exactitude into precision-tooled propulsive theater. By the end of a perfect production, you should feel you've been mainlining black coffee for two-and-a-half hours.
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For all its slam-bang theatrics, the plot is a marvel of intricate locomotive parts. (Walter Kerr, writing in The Times about a 1969 revival, felicitously described such workmanship as "a watch that laughed.") At its center is Hildy Johnson (a miscast Mr. Slattery, who looks like an elegant senator and behaves like an impressionable teenager), a 15-year veteran with The Chicago Examiner, who is finally leaving the business for marriage and respectability in the East.
But the day that Hildy is to depart Chicago with his bride-to-be (Halley Feiffer) is the day that one Earl Williams (John Magaro), an addled anarchist who shot a policeman, is to be hanged. And Hildy can't resist stopping by the Criminal Courts Building pressroom to say goodbye to that old gang of his.
What do you think the odds are that his farewells will be final? The good news for his colleagues (and audiences) is that Hildy is clearly hooked for life on the tawdry thrills of the chase. What's more, his ruthless, manipulative boss, the aforementioned Walter Burns, has no intention of letting Hildy go.
The bad news (for this production) is that Walter doesn't make his entrance until the end of the second of the play's three acts, though we regularly hear his voice yelling down the phone. (This is an interpolation, and a mistake; it dilutes the full glorious force of Mr. Lane's long-awaited arrival.)
Up to that point, we have had many flavorful line readings and carefully drawn bits of shtick from assorted Characters (who warrant capital C's, as they tend to in such plays). Among the gentlemen of the press, they include Mr. Mays (as a territorial germaphobe), Dylan Baker, Lewis J. Stadlen and David Pittu.
On the side of the law (and it's a sooty side), we have Mr. Goodman (in surprisingly one-note form) as the conniving, none-too-bright sheriff; Micah Stock, doing his eccentric straight-faced thing as a cop with a penchant for amateur psychology; and Dann Florek, who has some great pompous flourishes as the corrupt mayor.
In the small but crucial role of a messenger from the governor's office, Mr. Morse, who made his Broadway debut more than 60 years ago, proves he can still steal a scene without breaking a sweat. And then there are the women, who have the most thankless parts, and include Ms. Taylor as the mother of Hildy's fiancée and Ms. Scott as the streetwalker who has befriended the condemned man.
All of them have their moments. But these moments rarely connect into a breathless chain of events that couldn't stop itself if it wanted. That dazzling sense of infectious breakneck speed was what made Howard Hawks's film adaptation, "His Girl Friday" (1940), so satisfying. This revival has pockets of dead air that give us and the play's characters way too much time to think.
That is, until Mr. Lane shows up and justifies whatever salary he's getting and then some. His Walter is more monstrous and less charming that Cary Grant's was in "His Girl Friday," but it just as irresistible. The best teamwork on stage comes from Mr. Lane and a telephone, into which Walter shouts to his news desk with blistering disregard for all courtesy, human feeling and what we now call political correctness.
He's a horrible man. He also burns with a monomaniacal energy, channeled through Mr. Lane's well-honed comic finesse, that absorbs your utter interest and makes him as ridiculously seductive as Greta Garbo.
By the play's end, when Walter has done dirty by pretty much everyone, I swear you'll be panting to sign on in his employ. The combination of Mr. Lane's all-consuming passion for the theater and Walter's for getting the story makes the endangered profession of print journalism feel, for a flickering moment, like the most vital job on the planet.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/theater/review-the-front-page-nathan-lane.html
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