To marry or not to marry isn’t, of course, the only question. There is also the question of a constitutional right to the state of marriage that is being sought by American gays and lesbians, and is the subject of Paul Rudnick’s typically wise-cracking, but provocative and thoughtful new comedy, Regrets Only, receiving its world premiere in a dazzlingly cast production at Manhattan Theatre Club that includes Christine Baranski, George Grizzard and our own Sian Phillips.
I loved this play for both the wit of its delivery and the smartness of its off-centre view that has the world thrown into chaos when gays and lesbians suddenly withdraw their labour for a day, throwing the wedding ceremony of a Manhattan lawyer and his socialite wife into disarray, after the lawyer is consulted by the President on drafting a definition of marriage to keep gays out of its reach.
But is marriage a state worth aspiring to at all? In one of those neat theatrical juxtapositions you can sometimes achieve by going to the theatre back-to-back, as I have been doing over here, I saw Regrets Only on Tuesday night and then a new production of Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company on Wednesday afternoon, that revolves around a 35-year-old bachelor, Bobby, who refuses to commit – and with good reason, as he surveys the wrecked shells of the marriages of some of his best friends.
It’s a still-dazzling and pertinent show, even in the new circumstances of Brit director John Doyle’s new staging that follows his trademark method of having the actors play their own musical instruments. It’s not as intrusive as it was in his (Tony winning) production of Sweeney Todd, since George Furth’s book neatly separates the scenes and songs into stand-alone vignettes, so the actors don’t have to constantly swap between functions. There are occasional shafts of wit, too, as the trio of ‘You Could Drive a Person Crazy’, for instance, become a crazy sax combo. But this taxing technique of staging a show – shown to such ill-effect in Doyle’s London production of Mack and Mabel – is surely paying diminishing dramatic returns now that the novelty is wearing off.
For real novelty value, how’s this? A brand-new play, not seen in the West End or prior regional production, receiving its world premiere of Broadway – and by David Hare, moreover, whom you’d expect to be seeing at the National before anywhere else? Much has already been made of his dissatisfaction with the National’s handling of his last play there, Stuff Happens, that was withdrawn from the repertoire (of necessity, since it was part of the Travelex season and the Christmas show was already booked) when it still had a life in it. In an interview in The Observer a few weeks ago, he said, “The extraordinary mismanagement of that play didn’t leave me with the instinct to rush back there, obviously”, and added, “But the reason we’re starting this one here is simply because three-fifths of the characters are American, and there isn’t anything more sinister or strange about it.”
In the same interview, Hare also said something else interesting that had attracted him to doing his new play, The Vertical Hour, on Broadway first: “The straight play is a very endangered thing on Broadway. But what I have found, with Plenty and with Via Dolorosa, is that if you are the one serious play on Broadway you get a fantastic audience because there are so many clever people in New York. They mostly don’t go to the theatre - but they’ll go once a year. And once you get that audience, they’re the best audience in the world.”
And watching the play, still in preview at the Music Box Theatre last night, he’s right: it was the kind of attentive and smart audience that an attentive and smart play like this deserves.
