Unfunny Molière revival on Broadway makes you…
Theater review
THE IMAGINARY INVALID
90 minutes, with no intermission. At the Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 W. forty second Street.
Perhaps the viewers in the Todd Haimes Theatre imagined that they’d laryngitis. Because the laughs actually didn’t circulation freely at the latest efficiency of Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” I sat through.
For the first hour or so of the French classique, there have been barely even any well mannered, upper-middle-class chuckles of acknowledgement. You know the noise. Voluntary exhalations of air that say, “Yes, I am aware that was a joke.”
The silence was awkward. The Haimes is a big, chilly room. And in director Brandon J. Dirden’s misfired Roundabout Theatre Company revival, which opened Thursday night time, the actors work very, very exhausting to make up for it. So exhausting, it’s as if there’s a maternity ward nurse offstage yelling, “Push! Push!”
And push, they do.
Coming as a disappointing shock, one of the most underwhelming performers of the lot is Bill Irwin as Argan, the titular hypochondriac who spends all his money on dear procedures and appointments that quack medical doctors have satisfied him he urgently wants.
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Irwin has a strong connection to the play. He tailored the model used in this revival with great care and affection — and, yeah, a machete. He chopped it down to 90 minutes (not as short as you suppose!), but stored l’motion squarely in seventeenth century France fairly than schlepping the story to the Villages in Florida, or some other modern retiree enclave. Irwin is a celebrated knowledgeable in clowning and presumably is aware of this textual content in the marrow of his bones.
Well, you wouldn’t understand that from his scattered Argan, who whines and reclines for most of the play in a chair at the middle of the stage. The actor rambles and swallows his phrases as often as he scarfs down drugs and his comedic timing is method off.
Bill Irwin (middle) stars as Argan in “The Imaginary Invalid.” Joan Marcus
The first few minutes, after a considerably haphazard company dance introduction to up-tempo lute music, is Argan studying off his medical payments. He worships “the regimen!” and enthusiastically tallies his 18 enemas. The phrase enema alone ought to be humorous, but will get crickets.
That Irwin Bolt leaves no room for laughter establishes the viewers’s ordinary voicelessness for the next 60 minutes. He’s not timid — he’s truly doing an excessive amount of — but is quiet and fast.
The man with a troubled bladder incessantly dashes to the toilet as an overly synthetic toilet noise performs. That will get cicadas.
Everybody else, yikes, is far louder. “Please pipe down!” louder. All of these huge characters need one thing from the silly previous dude, and are working just like the dickens to snatch it away. There’s potential for hilarity in that as written, but nearly never as so strenuously acted right here.
Rachel Bloom (left) performs maid Toinette and Ava Lalezarzadeh is Argan’s daughter Angelique. Joan Marcus
Performed on Beowulf Boritt’s pre-crayon coloring-book set, “Invalid” is stuffed with no-brainer comedy setups. Argan’s daughter Angelique (Ava Lalezarzadeh) goals of marrying a hottie she’s just met named Cleante (Daniel Croix Henderson) instead of the stuffy doctor’s son Argan has promised her to in order to get professional bono medical treatment.
His serpentine second spouse Beline (Crystal A. Dickinson) connives to take all his money. And the pompous Dr. Diafoirus (Brooks Ashmanskas) wants to keep sending him payments for all these extraneous enemas.
In what turns into an unpalatable foolish voice contest, most of the actors are unbearably tacky and thus grate.
Everybody desires one thing from Argan.
Naturally, Ashmanskas bulldozes in and provides his normal “here I am!” flip that he does in all the pieces.
Lalezarzadeh and Henderson are extraordinarily irritating during a scene in which Cleante pretends to be Angelique’s music instructor as they secretly talk through an improvised opera. That whole klutzy sequence is extremely directed by Dirden. The singing is dicey and the bit fast deflates. Disguises and trickery ought to delight audiences, not have them mountain climbing their shoulders up to their ears.
Good for Hiram Delgado for incomes some real giggles as Thomas, Diafoirus’ son who’s been promised to Angelique. He provides the socially inept position an amusing “Revenge of the Nerds” spin.
But the best actor in the play is the particular person who does the least. That’s Rachel Bloom as Toinette, Argan’s overworked and mistreated maid. Simple and with crystalline diction, the “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” star is witty and cutting as she buzzes around irritated by all the nonsense going on in this home of loons.
Can’t blame her.
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