6 September 1973: Simon, The Sunshine Boys
Broadhurst Theatre, New York
The Broadhurst is one of the smaller Broadway houses, just a bit larger than “intimate,” or possibly the next size up. It was a little over half full in the orchestra, and an almost empty balcony. I can imagine operating on a house this small, especially since I and a goodly number of other persons had bought our tickets half-price (mine, Row F right, $9.00 for $4.50 +.50 service charge), and so it must be seasonal (late August – early September doldrums) and in addition attributable to one of the worst heat waves on record. But the theatre was air-conditioned.
And the performance, if not really sparkling, was up to pace. I was ready to enjoy it, laugh and relax, but as the first act moved on, it became a case of “trying to like Neil Simon.” What is the difference between this play and the TV series “The Odd Couple”? Nothing, really. And this is only incidentally because Simon himself is the author of The Odd Couple, one of his hit-a-year Broadway plays (which I didn’t see). It is the commodity-craft of the one-liner. Okay, there are some funny lines, only one instance of which I can remember:
Clark (quack doctor in a vaudeville skit): I went to Columbia Medical School.
Lewis (tax collector/patient): Did you pass?
Clark: Yes.
Lewis: you should have gone inside.
Granted, this is intentionally corny, broad as an old vaudeville routine gag, which is exactly what it is. But it’s exactly on material of this kind that Simon can somehow build a whole play. As I recall, Clive Barnes wrote a glowing review of this play in which he said that here we see the apotheosis of the one-liner (or something like that) — i.e., here is a play about an old vaudeville team, Lewis and Clark (get it?), Who specialized in the outrageously broad farcical situation which provided a loose structure for as many good pieces of repartee as the straight man / comic man duo could deliver, in machine-gun rapid-fire sequence; and thus Simon had found a sort of quintessential subject, since his own writing is essentially this same kind of thing. But — Barnes adds — Simon makes a Molièresque play out of it by allowing the lines to grow out of character. Lewis and Clark are Lewis and Clark, crotchety, short-tempered, evasive, outrageously difficult to get along with, yet forced to get along with each other for forty-three years because their act — their million routines — was such a success.
Barnes may have a point. There is a little pathos, undoubtedly genuine, in the futile attempt of the two comedians to come back together in a final farewell sequence on a CBS “World of Comedy” Special, after a lapse of eleven years following Lewis’s sudden decision to retire and the bitter quarrel that resulted. But this is really wishful thinking on Barnes’s part, and the comparison with Molière is especially revealing, and unintentionally depreciative of Simon. Because Simon is really the ethical opposite of Molière. In Moli