The Odd Couple

Listen up! Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple is back, 40 years after its premiere. But if you’ve come to this review for a revisionist essay on the legendary comedy genius’s canon, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. Along with Barefoot in the Park , due on the Main Stem in January, The Odd Couple represents Simon at his best and remains a superior example of commercial Broadway entertainment.

Everything that was originally oh-so-right about the set-up — a divorced man and a divorcing man share digs and ultimately begin replicating the dynamic of their marriages — is still hilariously right. I think it was The New Yorker‘s Brendan Gill who used to chide Simon for being a joke machine. Gill was on the money, but so was Simon, who raked in the shekels for being able to elicit guffaw after guffaw over the course of this and so many other plays.

But Gill underestimated Simon if he believed that the industrious playwright was not deriving comedy from his characters. The slovenly Oscar Madison (Nathan Lane) and the fastidious Felix Ungar (Matthew Broderick) are funny not because they pull wisecracks from thin air but because everything is motivated by their distinct personalities. The same goes for their four poker-playing buddies –Murray (Brad Garrett), Speed (Rob Bartlett), Roy (Peter Frechette), and Vinnie (Lee Wilkof) — and those dateable English sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon (Olivia d’Abo and Jessica Stone), who drop by for a home-cooked meal that goes awry.

Brought together under one exposed-beam Riverside Drive ceiling (designed by the very busy John Lee Beatty), Oscar and Felix provoke belly laughs with lines that don’t sound like punchlines. Sentences such as “Try to eat over the plate” and “You don’t even know it’s a ladle” don’t raise the corners of your mouth when you read them out of context, but as positioned by Simon, they’re side-splitters. He keeps ’em coming as consistently as André Agassi’s return of serve, and there isn’t an unforced error in the entire game, set, and match.

Still, The Odd Couple falls short of certain marks. Oscar and Felix are both trying, without evident success, to recover from failed marriages; but Simon didn’t lend enough weight to that aspect of his seemingly effortless play, based on his brother Danny Simon’s real-life experience. He hints at the odd couple being made up of two tentatively lost men but doesn’t do much more than skim the surface of their common plight. Back in 1965, The Odd Couple didn’t have much edge — and it hasn’t much edge today, when “edge” is a widely-praised commodity. Poke the work and it’s revealed to be a softie.

Fortunately, this revival has just enough edge to enthrall ticket-buyers into anteing up big bucks. Director Joe Mantello has done a bang-up job of finding humor in every tossed plate of pasta, every compulsive shuffle of cards, every sustained take, every chase through swinging doors, every ashtray strategically positioned, every spray of disinfectant. And if it’s true that proper casting is 90 percent of a top-flight director’s job, Mantello has done this job spectacularly well by assembling a dream cast.

Every so often, it’s announced that the new Lunts have arrived, but now they really have. Not only can Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick sell out Broadway theaters on the strength of their names above the title — just as the Lunts did in the middle of the last century — but, also like their predecessors, the Lane-Broderick cup runneth over with shrewd technique. Both are just as delightful here as when they were playing The Producers. It’s a Picky Pete who’d contend that, to a large extent, they’re repeating themselves; we might as well carp at The Marx Brothers or The Three Stooges or Bing Crosby and Bob Hope for repeating themselves.

Kudos also to Garrett, who proves that he’s as adept on stage as he was in front of the Everybody Loves Raymond cameras; Bartlett in his pork-pie hat; Frechette in his accountant’s specs; Wilkof in his too-short trousers; and Stone and d’Abo as the giggling siblings. Neil Simon may have been alone in crafting The Odd Couple, but as the product is once again shipped to consumers, expert hands are transporting it.