Same old 'Couple'

BY LINDA WINER | STAFF WRITER

October 28, 2005

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the revival of Neil Simon's 'The Odd Couple.' Brooks Atkinson Theater. (Newsday/Ari Mintz.)

Unless you count the preposterous box-office demand, there is nothing odd - or even a teensy bit peculiar - about "The Odd Couple." The hysterically anticipated revival, which opened its sold-out, six-month run last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, promises the familiar pleasures of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick and Neil Simon's best-known, arguably most-loved comedy.

And promises are kept in Joe Mantello's affectionate, humane, sweetly detailed production, which treats the characters and their wisecracks as if Broadway hadn't first fallen for them in 1965 and the movies had not adapted them in 1968 and TV had not turned sloppy Oscar and neatnik Felix into part of American iconography in the '70s.

The comfort level of Broadway's massive nostalgia spasm had been briefly threatened by reports that Broderick was slow to nail the nuance of Felix - much less his lines. Fear not: He and Lane are as symbiotically inspired as they were in "The Producers" and presumably will be again in the upcoming film.

Forgive us (or not) if you sense a tone of malaise in this report of an attraction that most theatergoers can never see anyway.

Lane is a delightful thug as the divorced Oscar, a role created on stage and film by Walter Matthau and imprinted in our homes by Jack Klugman. Broderick has his just-hatched pallor and ungainly grace in the part that belonged first to Art Carney, was filmed by Jack Lemmon and was so identified with Tony Randall that it was hard to see where Felix ended and the actor began. If this Oscar is an alpha-bulldog, this Felix is a lamb in a tie and rubber kitchen gloves.

But Oscar and Felix are not Hamlet or Vanya. The roles don't exactly offer layers of interpretive elbow room for such gifted performers to dance new dances. If Lane and Broderick are going to be the best-buddy equivalent of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, shouldn't we wish them new bondings to explore in a theater that would probably support them through anything?

Mantello, who knows his way through such contrasting aesthetics as "Wicked," "Assassins" and "Glengarry Glen Ross," proves here that he can be equally in command of Broadway's old-time, middle-aged, middle-class humor. Why he wants to is less simple to understand, but he has approached each double-take and punchline as a classic.

The poker gang has been peopled with consummate character actors, including Brad Garrett ("Everyone Loves Raymond") as Murray, the gentle giant of a cop. With Lee Wilkof, Rob Bartlett and Peter Frechette around the table, the first smoky image has the instant macho atmosphere of those paintings of card-playing dogs.

Oscar's mess of an apartment has been designed by John Lee Beatty with all the unappreciated splendor of an eight-room prewar flat on Riverside Drive in the '60s. Ann Roth's costumes are keenly remembered, down to the clear plastic handbags for the neighboring Pigeon sisters - played with girlish squeaks and seductive coos by Olivia d'Abo and Jessica Stone.

With "Barefoot in the Park" opening in January, we are halfway through the season's early-Simon retrospective. Both defined his style and made his fortune as the last of the red-hot commercial playwrights, who wrote 16 comedy hits in 17 years. This was decades before the triumphant autobiographical trilogy that began in 1983 with "Brighton Beach Memoirs," before he won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize with "Lost in Yonkers" and before he returned to comedy only to find his voice out of fashion.

Clearly, we are entering a time for salutes and reassessments of this formative playwright. It is good to see how well "The Odd Couple" has worn, just as we are intrigued to know how "Barefoot in the Park" holds up. As early as 1995, however, Simon had an actress in "London Suite" complain that the American theater is "all revivals and then they revive the revivals." And five years later, in his short-lived "Dinner Party," a novelist asks, almost defensively, "Why should I write what the public doesn't want?"

Revival or not, star challenge or not, theatergoers want this "Odd Couple" so much that most of them can't get in. There is humor here, too.

THE ODD COUPLE. By Neil Simon, directed by Joe Mantello. Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St. Tickets: $60 to $100. Call 212-307-4100. Seen at Tuesday preview.