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hesIt’s Not Life on the Mississippi, Jean-François Honey
December 10, 2007
THEATER REVIEW | 'IS HE DEAD?'
It's Not Life on the Mississippi, Jean-François Honey
By BEN BRANTLEY
What might have been a wheeze turns out to be a giggle.
“Is He Dead?,” a previously unproduced play by the long-dead Mark Twain, has at last made its Broadway debut. And for something that’s basically been lying immobile for more than a century, gathering dust in archives, it has a remarkably sprightly step.
Most of the credit, I hasten to add, does not belong to the immortal author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” whose many literary crowns did not include that of laurel-wreathed dramatist. Twain’s trenchant satirist’s eye is just barely discernible in this silly, formulaic farce, written in 1898, about a starving French painter forced to don women’s clothes.
But with the right doctors, even a long-buried dinosaur can be made to dance. “Is He Dead?,” which opened last night at the Lyceum Theater, benefits mightily from a top-grade team of resurrection artists. They include the director Michael Blakemore, the playwright David Ives (who adapted Twain’s script) and an infectiously happy cast, led by the wondrous Norbert Leo Butz, that serves a master class in making a meal out of a profiterole.
Reclaimed from the mothballs by the scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who came upon the manuscript five years ago in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, “Is He Dead?” would likely generate only a few chuckles (and many a cry of “Oh, brother”) in the reading. Its plot suggests an ungainly younger cousin to “Charley’s Aunt,” Brandon Thomas’s popular cross-dressing comedy from 1892.
Set in and near Paris in 1846, “Is He Dead?” presents a lineup of cultural and farcical stereotypes, seen with the wide-eyed-with-a-wink gaze that Twain brought to “The Innocents Abroad,” the travel memoir that made him solvent. At the show’s center is Jean-François Millet (no, the name is not a coincidence), a brilliant but unrecognized painter played by Mr. Butz. Since Jean-François can’t sell a landscape to save his life (literally), his inner circle of bohemian friends — an ethnic stew made up of an American (Michael McGrath), a German (Tom Alan Robbins) and an Irishman (Jeremy Bobb) — convince him that faking his death is just the ticket for raising his stock. So Jean-François disappears from life and re-emerges as his imaginary twin sister, a widow both mad and madcap. The expected complications ensue.
You’re groaning, right? I’ll admit I wasn’t all that happy for the play’s first 10 minutes or so, despite the obvious polish of the cast and the physical production, which includes exaggerated postcard-pretty sets (Peter J. Davison) and costumes (Martin Pakledinaz), as well as a slew of reproductions of the real Millet’s paintings.
But once Mr. Butz puts on a pink dress, this Tony-winning comic actor (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), who had been rather flavorless in his opening scene, shows the true comic genius of which he is made. From that moment the whole production feels as if it’s been pumped through with nitrous oxide. Jokes you would swear you would never laugh at suddenly seem funny.
Mr. Blakemore, the British director who has brought such theatrical élan to the complexity of Michael Frayn (“Copenhagen,” “Democracy”), here exhibits the same comic assurance he demonstrated in the 1983 Broadway premiere of Mr. Frayn’s master farce “Noises Off.” He keeps the familiar machinery running smoothly without ever letting it shift into automatic pilot. And he understands the difference between knowing exaggeration and crowd-pandering vulgarity.
So does his cast, which offers a spectrum of witty variations on theatrical fossils. These include (in addition to the national cartoons of Mr. McGrath, Mr. Robbins and Mr. Bobb), John McMartin’s frisky take on the elderly gentleman lecher, Jenn Gambatese’s and Bridget Regan’s versions of the palpitating ingénues, and Patricia Conolly’s and Marylouise Burke’s sweet, stylish turns as a pair of fluttering old maids.
Byron Jennings appears to be having the time of his life as a sleek, melodramatic villain. (His greyhound carriage and vulpine face have seldom been used to such piquant visual advantage.) And David Pittu plays too many people to count with a consummate blend of precision and enthusiasm that is this production’s hallmark.
Looking like a cross between Kirsten Dunst and Joan Sutherland in “La Traviata,” Mr. Butz in drag is a minor miracle, both honoring the conventions of a hoary elbow-ribbing type and making them feel brand new. Like many great comic actors he suggests that he has more energy than a human body can naturally contain. Put him in the captivity of a whalebone corset and tiers of taffeta, and he becomes a bizarrely frilly volcano poised on the brink of eruption.
I’m not going to quote much from the play, since most of its jokes wither and die when removed from the rarefied air of the Lyceum. Anyway, I’m not sure which one-liners are Twain’s and which come from Mr. Ives, the author of the delightful “All in the Timing.” (Example: Mr. McGrath’s character speaks of taking a potential client “to ‘The Gleaners.’”)
And I probably shouldn’t tell you that there’s extended horseplay involving the stench of Limburger cheese and the centuries-old shtick involving an attractive woman who turns out to be made of artificial parts. Mr. Butz and company proceed with such giddy confidence that by evening’s end the show fleetingly assumes the authoritative absurdity of Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton. (There’s even a thrown-away Wildean-Ortonian line, “I congratulate you on your polygamy.”)
I don’t know about you, but as winter’s grayness creeps up on us, I’m in the mood for savvy stupidity. And Broadway isn’t doing much to satisfy that taste. (“Young Frankenstein”? Give me a break.)
“Is He Dead?” may be a scam, trying to pass off copper as gold. But by the time Mr. Butz raises his skirts and kicks up his heels for a final dance of the seven petticoats (or however many there are), there was indeed gold dust in my eyes.
IS HE DEAD?
By Mark Twain, adapted by David Ives; directed by Michael Blakemore; sets by Peter J. Davison; costumes by Martin Pakledinaz; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; music and sound by David Van Tieghem; hair and wig design by Paul Huntley; associate producers, Jacki Barlia Florin and Robert G. Bartner; dance sequences by Pamela Remler; general management and executive producers, 101 Productions Ltd. Presented by Bob Boyett, Roger Berlind, Daryl Roth, Jane Bergère, E. Morten/P. Robbins, J. O’Boyle-R. Stevens, Roy Miller, Sonia Friedman Productions/Ambassador Theater Group and Tim Levy in association with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. At the Lyceum Theater, 149 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours.
WITH: Norbert Leo Butz (Jean-François Millet), Michael McGrath (Agamemnon Buckner), Jenn Gambatese (Marie Leroux), Tom Alan Robbins (Hans von Bismarck), Bridget Regan (Cecile Leroux), Jeremy Bobb (Phelim O’Shaughnessy), Marylouise Burke (Madame Caron), Patricia Conolly (Madame Bathilde), David Pittu (Basil Thorpe/Claude Rivière/Charlie/the King of France), Byron Jennings (Bastien André) and John McMartin (Papa Leroux).