'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!

'The Government Inspector'

Mistaken identity’s been around as a plot focus for a long time--certainly since Oedipus mistook his father for a highway robber and his mother for a grieving widow.  Of course, that boo-boo ended in tragedy—and the fall of the entire House of Thebes.  Sometime later, writers started using the gag for comedy rather than tragedy and we ended up with stories like The Comedy of Errors (two cases of mistaken ID’s).  Often Shakespeare liked to use disguises to help set up the mis-recognitions, specially dressing gals up as guys—which was especially weird in Elizabethan times since the girls were played by boys in drag to begin with, so you ended up with a dude in drag pretending to be a chick in trou.  Talk about your identity crisis!  (Usually in those plays—Twelfth Night, As You Like It—the girl-dressed-as-a-boy falls in love with some guy and he starts having feelings for him/her and before Mike Pence can show up, the secret identity is revealed.  Never mind that it’s two guys to begin with—which was humongously frowned-upon in the 16th and 17th centuries.) 

Anyway, we’re still using that gag today.  Watch any sitcom long enough and you’ll catch an episode that centers on a mistaken ID.  I particularly remember an episode of the Britcom Fawlty Towers in which hotelier Basil Fawlty, played memorably by John Cleese, finds out that a hotel inspector is coming incognito and, of course, Basil picks the wrong man to fawn all over, while neglecting and insulting the actual reviewer at every turn.  Of course, as with nearly anything with John Cleese, it was hilarity elevated—or sunk—to the max. 

Hey, wait!  I know that one.  Isn’t that ripped off from The Government Inspector?  Sure it is—Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 farce, sometimes also called The Inspector General.  It’s practically the same story, reset some 150 years later and moved from a small town in the Russian provinces to a small hotel in the English countryside—but the same exact premise.  Oh, as Gogol might have said (if he’d lived to be 166—and got a TV that received BBC in Russian):  Znayu ya vashego brata!!  “I’ve got your number, John Cleese!” 

Well, as someone or other said, There’s nothing new under the sun.  Someone else also observed that there are only so many plots and we just keep recycling them with little tweaks.  So Cleese and his writing partner, Connie Booth (who also played the chambermaid, Polly) based “The Hotel Inspectors” (1975) on The Government Inspector, Gogol’s farce about an über-corrupt mayor in a provincial backwater who learns that an official from Saint Petersburg is on his way incognito to suss out dishonesty and incompetence.  The local innkeeper figures it must be one of his guests who arrived unannounced from the capital and has been taking notes on the diners in the inn.  So, for the rest of the play’s two hours and 20 minutes, Mayor Anton Antonovich and his equally venal family members, the other town officials, and the county’s landowners all try to bribe, cajole, and seduce the stranger, Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov, so he’ll overlook the mess the town around him is in. 

The problem is, of course, that Hlestakov (spelled Khlestakov in some other translations), just about as doltish as the locals, not only isn’t the inspector from Saint Petersburg, he’s a total nobody, a minor clerk in a meaningless ministry who’s so broke he can’t even buy his girl a nickel coke.  (Oops!  Sorry.  That’s Most Happy Fella, another plot that revolves around mistaken identity!  My bad.)  I mean, pay his inn bill and he’s just about to shoot himself—if he can just get himself to look good doing it—when the Mayor and his entourage burst into his room and start throwing money at him.  Hlestakov has no idea why everyone wants to give him money—but he’s more than happy to accept that and more.  You see, young Hlestakov is something of a con man his own self.  (One source on Russian lit describes the character as “the liar, the shallow imposter, the vulgar symbol of universal emptiness”—sound like anyone you know?  But the book was published when Donald Trump was about 12, so he couldn’t have been the author’s template!)  He’s also not above taking advantage of the situation when both the Mayor’s wife, Anna Andreyevna, and his daughter, Marya Antonovna, throw themselves at him and arrange assignations with him.  Hlestakov’s been impressing everyone with his erudition and class—when everyone else is a low-bow moron, it’s easy to be the smartest in the room—and before anyone can find out who he really is, he absconds—in the Mayor’s cherished troika, mind you—for his father’s hut in a nearby hamlet where he’d been heading when he ran out of money.

Of course, the real government inspector reveals himself in the end.  I won’t say who it is and spoil that surprise in case prospective theatergoers don’t twig to it before the dénouement (or haven’t read the play beforehand), but I will say that the people of Gogol’s town in the boondocks all get what they deserve and are left with broken dreams of the glory and wealth that Hlestakov—who gets clean away, by the way—promised them.  As the town officials and the Mayor's family stand stunned, the Mayor predicts that “centuries from now they’ll still be laughing at us.”   In Gogol’s comic indictment of tsarist bureaucracy and officialdom, there’s not a single admirable person, no one who’s side we can take, no one we can root for—and yet, as if to prove Gogol, adapter Jeffrey Hatcher, and Mayor correct, the audience at the Duke guffawed throughout the entire play nonetheless. 

If any of you knows The Government Inspector (or The Inspector General) and my description of the play above varies from what you’re familiar with, that’s because the production on which I based my synopsis is an adaptation by playwright Hatcher (Never Gonna Dance, 2003-04, book; A Picasso, 2005; Scotland Road, 1998; Three Viewings, 1995) as staged by the Red Bull Theater at the Duke on 42nd Street.  Hatcher wrote the treatment, based on Gogol’s original, Revizor, for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2008; artistic director Joe Dowling directed the première.  (Subsequent productions were mounted by Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 2009; Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2012, and by the Furious Theatre Company, resident company at the Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California, also in 2012.  It’s also popular with college and university theaters.)  Hatcher’s text was published in an acting edition by the Dramatists Play Service in 2009.

Gogol (1809-52) began writing Revizor (the Russian word for ‘inspector’) in 1835.  He’d apparently begun an earlier play on tsarist bureaucracy in 1832 but abandoned it in anticipation of official censorship.  He wrote to Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the great Russian poet who was a sort of mentor to the younger writer, asking for an idea, “an authentically Russian anecdote” which he could turn into a stage comedy.  Pushkin sent him a description of a incident that had actually happened to him in 1833 in which the poet himself had been mistaken for a government inspector.  The Government Inspector was published in 1836 (and revised in 1842 for a later edition); the Russian press protested loudly and Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) had to step in to get the play staged at Saint Petersburg’s Aleksandinsky Imperial Theater (April 1836); it was staged in Moscow at the Maly Theater in May 1836.  The petty bureaucrats and corrupt politicians he lampooned so assailed the playwright, he eventually went into self-exile, remaining outside Russia for 12 years. 

The play’s been revived many times around the world in many translations and adaptations.  Productions were mounted on Broadway in 1923, 1930 (staged by Jed Harris with Dorothy Gish as Marya Antonovna), 1935 (as Revisor, performed in Russian by the Moscow Art Players), 1978 (directed by Liviu Ciulei with Theodore Bikel as the Mayor), 1993-94 (from Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre, with Randall as Khlestakov and Lainie Kazan as Anna, the Mayor’s wife).  The play has been adapted for film many times in various languages; the only English-language film is a 1949 musical adaptation, entitled The Inspector General, directed by Henry Koster starring Danny Kaye for Warner Bros., a severely bowdlerized version that is reset in Napoleonic France.  In 1958, the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a television adaptation of the play (available on video).  The BBC broadcast a series based on the play in 1976.

The first recorded Off-Broadway staging is the current Red Bull production, which began previews at the Duke on 14 May and opened to the press on 1 June; the revival is scheduled to close on 24 June.  Diana, my frequent theater companion, met me at the theater in the New 42nd Street Studios west of Broadway for the 7:30 performance on Tuesday, 30 May, the production’s penultimate preview.

Red Bull, which apparently does only one full production a season (they do readings and other programs, such as the Short New Play Festival), seems to have something of a following, though I know nothing about them (I’d heard its name here and there, but that’s all).  The company, which one reviewer characterized as a “sort of alternative classical theater company” which “has made a niche out of producing rarely-seen historical plays that similar companies won’t dare touch,” was founded in 2003, taking its name from one of the leading theaters in Elizabethan London. The original Red Bull Theatre, built in 1604, continued to present illegal performances, especially drolls (short farcical sketches incorporating songs, dances, physical comedy, and witty language), after 1642 when the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell closed all the theaters.  (The theater was raided several times during the Puritan interregnum for performing plays and actors were arrested for working there.)  According to the modern troupe, the original Red Bull was the first theater in London to reopen after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  The Red Bull Theatre burned down in 1666, one of the last theaters to fall during the Great Fire of London.

“Embracing this rejuvenating spirit,” the current company states as its mission, “the Red Bull Theater aims to be in the vanguard of new classical theater for the 21st century, creating a home for plays of heightened language and epic expression in evocative performances.”  The company focuses on exploring and creating “heightened language plays.”  (Berger apparently has a fondness for the grim and gory dramas of the Jacobean period—decidedly not among my own favorites.)  Since it débuted with William Shakespeare’s Pericles (2003), the Red Bull, which is a peripatetic theater without a permanent home, has produced such classic plays as The Revenger’s Tragedy (2005-06); Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2007); Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (2008), and The Witch of Edmonton by John Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley (2011), along with modern language plays such as Jean Genet’s The Maids (2012), Loot by Joe Orton (2014), and Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep (2014).  According to its own publicity statements, Red Bull has received awards and nominations from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, Drama Desk, Drama League, Off-Broadway Alliance, and the Joe A. Calloway (Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation) and OBIE committees.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, born in the Ukraine on April Fool’s Day, was a descendant of Cossacks.  (His 1835 novel, Taras Bulba, is a heroic tale of a 16th-century Cossack chieftain, filmed in 1962 with Yul Brynner in the title role and Tony Curtis as one of his sons.)  His father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a member of the so-called petty gentry (who had the privileges and status of nobility but didn’t own serfs), was an unpublished Ukrainian-language poet and playwright and, as a child, Gogol helped stage plays in Ukrainian in his uncle’s home theater.  Unpopular with his classmates at the Prince Bezborodko Gymnasium of Higher Learning in the city of Nezhin (now Nizhyn Gogol State University), they nicknamed him the “mysterious dwarf” because of his physical and social peculiarities.  He was secretive, had a tart tongue and a wicked talent for mimicry, and apparently took delight in being different from his fellows—but the gymnasium started the student on his road to writing.  Upon leaving school in 1828, Gogol took a low-level, low-paying clerkship in the tsarist bureaucracy in Saint Petersburg (much like his character Hlestakov in The Government Inspector).  The would-be littérateur brought with him to the capital a romantic poem (Pushkin’s forte) he’d written, a long narrative of a rural German life called Hans Küchelgarten (the name means “Johnny Chickenyard”), which he self-published under the pseudonym V. Alov.  It was roundly derided by critics and editors, and the young poet bought up and burned all the copies of the magazines in which he’d paid to publish the piece.  

After failing at his first post, Gogol took a second government job at which he also failed.  Then he took up teaching at a girl’s boarding school in 1831, the same year he published the first volume of collected stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, based on Ukrainian folk stories; volume two came out the next year, firmly establishing the young author as a Slavophile writer.  The collection became an immediate success, bringing the young author to Pushkin’s attention.  This success made him welcome among Russia’s literati.  In 1834, Gogol took up his second teaching position,  Professor of Medieval History at Saint Petersburg University, a post for which he had no qualifications and quickly proved himself no better at higher learning than he’d been at government work; the writer lasted only one year.  (He satirized himself in one of his own stories!)  That year, however, Gogol put out two more books: Mirgorod, more short stories, and Arabesques, a collection of essays.  The works the writer published between 1832 and 1836 moved Russia’s literary critics to consider him a Russian rather than Ukrainian writer. 

During this period, Gogol also published two plays, Marriage and The Government Inspector, launching the theatrical aspect of his writing career.  As I’ve already noted, The Government Inspector was taken up by Tsar Nicholas I, who requested the first production in 1836.  The audience was stunned, and the resultant controversy, which completely surprised the 27-year-old Gogol, divided Russian society into Government Inspector revilers and defenders.  Ultimately, the response of the government bureaucrats—“Everybody is against me,” he complained—drove the author to leave Russia and he spent the next 12 years traveling in central and western Europe.  (Of a frail constitution, Gogol suffered from severe hypochondria, among other complexes, both real and imagined.)  Upon Pushkin’s death in 1837, however, Gogol was accorded the great poet’s status as the leading Russian writer of the day.  His novel Dead Souls, considered his masterwork, and the first edition of his collected works were both published in 1842, and six years later, the writer returned to Russia, settling in Moscow.  Dead Souls, intended to be the start of a larger, three-volume project, sealed Gogol’s reputation as the great satirist of Tsarist Russia.

In 1852, Gogol died at age 42, the result in large part of extreme asceticism under the guidance of a spiritual “elder” (known as a “starets,” literally an ‘old man’).  The writer became deeply depressed and began burning some of his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls.  Taking to his bed, Gogol refused to eat and died in great discomfort.  His remains are buried in Moscow.

It’s remarkable that the total farce that is The Government Inspector came from the same pen as Dead Souls, a morbid, grim but naturalistic satire.  (Gogol wrote the 1842 novel  Dead Souls; the famous stage production directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky for the Moscow Art Theater in 1932 was an adaptation by Mikhail Bulgakov.  The ‘souls’ in the title is the word Russians used to refer to serfs, not considered fully ‘persons,’ and Chichikov, the novel’s main character, “buys” deceased souls to show on paper that he owns hundreds of serfs to increase his standing in the community.)  The adaptation by Hatcher, which runs two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission (Gogol’s original is a five-act play), is contemporary without updating the action or the references (though there are some double entendres that suggest current events and figures)—however, Hatcher does play loose with the language and sexual innuendos that I doubt would have passed the censors in 1836 Russia.  

Red Bull’s Government Inspector is pretty good and well handled.  Farce isn’t easy, but the company does all right.  Diana left at intermission, but I don’t know if she didn’t like it, or was just anxious about her departure for Chicago the next morning.  (She kept comparing the production to Saturday Night Live, but I don’t know if she meant that’s good or bad.  I went off SNL years ago, but I have no idea how she feels about the show.)

The rest of the audience at the Duke was extremely receptive to all the humor, verbal and physical.  They behaved almost like a claque!  Still, I have to say that the cast is pretty adept at the style—occasionally, they seem to be trying a little too hard—and the leads, Tony-winner Michael McGrath (for Nice Work if You Can Get It, 2012, Best Featured Actor in a Musical) as the  Mayor and, especially, Michael Urie as Hlestakov, are excellent.  Urie, who looks like he should be playing young leading men, is particularly adept at the physical comedy; he does a marvelous drunk scene at the end of act one.  Not long ago, I complained about a comedy performances that the actors played the comedy too lightly when I thought they’d be funnier if they approached their characters as if they were in earnest.  The Government Inspector works that way a little, too, and director Berger keeps his company in check enough that they all seem to be taking their lives, their circumstances, and themselves seriously.  We know they’re fools and buffoons; they don’t.  If the actors play the buffoons as buffoons, making faces and silly gestures like clowns . . . well, you get Danny Kaye’s film version.

The Government Inspector is another in a string of ensemble shows I’ve seen this season—have I unearthed a pattern?—and each of the performers has at least one terrific turn in a scene with no more than one or two other characters.  (Ryan Garbayo and Ben Mehl as the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber of  landowners, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, for example, are never seen out of each other’s company—the two come off as a poor man’s Harpo and Chico without the horn, the accent, and the wiles—so their scenes with the Mayor or Hlestakov always include at least three actors.  Of course, that’s a big part of the gag, and Gogol set it up that way—which is why their names rhyme; both their given names are Pyotr Ivanovich.  Another part of the joke is that, although they’re not related, they even look alike—and Garbayo and Mehl, with their identical facial hair, could pass for brothers on stage.)  When the company is all together on the rather narrow playing area—the cast numbers 14 actors playing 24 characters—they often convey the impression of disorganized chaos; other times, they perform what in the army we used to call a group grope.  Seven company members play 17 parts and they make them astonishingly distinct—some of which is from the excellent work of costume designer Tilly Grimes and hair and wig designer Dave Bova.  Especially successful in this deception are Arnie Burton, who plays Osip, Hlestakov’s servant, as a sullen, slovenly, malcontented serf and the Postmaster as an affectedly loose-lipped and habitual snoop; and Mary Lou Rosato (taking the honors for playing four characters), whose Grusha, the Mayor’s family’s maid is a more kempt female version of Osip, and the Waitress at the inn which she plays on her knees as if she were a very short woman.  (There’s even a joke that capitalizes on her stature.)  

(One silly sidelight:  Back in 2014, I saw a Classic Stage Company production of David Ives’s adaptation of a French classic comedy, The Heir Apparent—see my report on 25 April 2014—in which David Pittu also played a character on his knees.  I wondered if  Rosato and Pittu know each other or if Rosato saw Pittu’s performance.  Some coincidences are just too perfect to overlook!)

There’s one odd staging choice—which may have been unavoidable.  Alexis Distler’s serviceable set (lit brightly by Megan Lang and Peter West) is on two levels and on the lower level is the Mayor’s office on stage left and Hlestakov’s room at the local inn, stage right.  A curtain covers one while the other’s in use.  Above is the interior of the Mayor’s house where all the rest of the action occurs after scenes one and two of act one.  So for two-thirds of the play, we’re looking at the top level of the set, with a closed red curtain below.  The seats are pretty steeply raked, so the upper stage is close to eye-level of row D, where Diana and I sat, so it wasn’t a hardship—but it was kind of odd.  I wonder if reversing the sets would have been any better.  Is it easier to ignore a closed-off upper stage than a closed-off lower one?

As I reported, I don’t know if Diana didn’t like the play—when she left, she said, “I can pretty well tell what’s going to develop,” which isn’t necessary an apt way to approach a farce.  Seeing how the playwright and the director and actors handle the developments is what you miss.  In a farce, it’s not just the plot but the antics and how they’re executed that we’re supposed to judge, no?  Diana, for instance, witnessed the impromptu party at the Mayor’s house at the end of act one, which, in addition to Urie’s inspired drunk scene—he gets increasingly inebriated and out of control until he literally collapses on the floor and ends up hanging off the edge of the upper stage with a look on his face that’s reminiscent of that ubiquitous photo of a cat hanging from a line—but she missed the scene at the opening of the second act in which Hlestakov is importuned by both the Mayor’s wife, oversexed and convinced of her attractiveness, and his daughter, like a sullen and  petulant teenager, in the same room at the same time or the scene that follows where all the town officials hide in the same closet and then come out one by one (or, in Bob- and Dobchinsky’s case, two at a time) to offer the young imposter bribes.  The audience, as Diana remarked somewhat astonished, ate this up (a standing O, of course)—but I enjoyed it, too.  Not as uproariously as the others seemed to, but more than well enough.  (I have never had any objection to plays that are just fun—though, of course, The Government Inspector is a commentary on the tsarist bureaucracy—well, Russian, since that country’s had inept and corrupt officials running rampant in every political regime, including the present one.)  

Show-Score rated The Government Inspector’s critical reception an 82 off of a sampling of 30 reviews.  The breakdown was  95% positive, 4% mixed, and 3% negative notices, with the high score being one 95 (ZEALnyc), with six 90’s (including the New York Times); the lowest-rated review was a single 40 (Front Row Center), the only negative notice.  My survey will include 15 reviews.

In one of Show-Score’s 90-rated reviews, Diana Barth remarked in the Epoch Times that when the curtain falls on Red Bull’s The Government Inspector, “We have been greatly entertained.  But mightn’t we also be a bit uncomfortable?”  She asked of the performance: “Is it possibly a mirror of ourselves?  And of our governing officials?”  Barth dubbed the production “a hilarious comedy, beautifully cast and acted” with a “spiffy two-level set” and “excellent costumes.”  The ET reviewer also had high praise for Urie (particularly the drunk scene, “the highpoint of the production”) and compliments for Mary Testa’s Mayor’s wife and Talene Monahon’s daughter.  In am New York, Matt Windman described Hatcher’s adaptation as “freewheeling” and Berger’s staging as “big, brash and buoyant.”  It is “a high-energy, fast-paced production with gleefully over-the-top performances and door-slamming slapstick comedy,” Windman affirmed. 

“Few plays, though, have taken [mistaken identity] to the mad heights occupied by Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Government Inspector,’” observed Ben Brantley in a pre-opening blurb in the New York Times, adding that the play “infuses scathing satire with giddy surrealism.”  In his regular review (rated 90 on Show-Score) a few days later, Brantley called the play a “rollicking 19th-century satire of bad behavior in the Russian provinces” being given a “buoyant production” that “generates the kind of collective enthusiasm in its audience that you associate with home-team football games.”  He reported, “The pleasures afforded by this breakneck show—. . . featuring a virtuosic cast led by a path-clearing cyclone of silliness called Michael Urie—are as old as the days when cave dwellers discovered that human stupidity was really kind of funny, as well as potentially tragic. ”  The Timesman asserted that from the “freewheeling but spiritually faithful adaptation” by playwright Hatcher, you “might think that [its] worldview is a little too close to real life these days.”  In that party scene at the end of the first act, Brantley noted that the celebrants are all drinking the local wine (fermented in a spittoon!) that Hlestakov describes as “[v]iscous and yet so bubbly,” which “isn’t a bad description for this show as a whole,” the review-writer added.  He also acknowledged that Urie’s drunk show is “one of the most exquisitely controlled displays of uncontrolled drunkenness I’ve ever witnessed.”  Part of the responsibility for this is Berger’s direction, of which Brantley wrote:

But Mr. Berger. . . has staged his “Government Inspector” with a subversive straightforwardness.  While there’s plenty of hilarious Marx Brothers-style anarchy here, all the performances are dead serious in their ridiculousness, capturing the big, self-preserving egos beneath the small-town madness.

“And what a team Mr. Berger has assembled to execute that mission,” the Times review-writer exclaimed.  In his other piece, Brantley described them as “a doozy of a cast, which includes such masters of mayhem as” Burton, DeRosa, McGrath, Testa, and Monahon.  (He admitted he “felt remiss in not mentioning every cast member.”)  Brantley made special mention of Urie as the “lamest of lamebrains,” declaring, “His Ivan is [a] distinctive comic creation, a dimwitted narcissist who nonetheless makes thinking on his feet a self-contained slapstick ballet.”   He further proclaimed, “Mr. Urie establishes himself as a bona fide leading man, in the tradition of great physical comedy performers like Kevin Kline.” 

In the “Goings On About Town” column of the New Yorker, the reviewer reported that Hatcher “retains the original framework” of Gogol’s original 1836 play, “but gives the jokes a zingy modern spin.”  Dubbing the Red Bull production “raucous,” the unnamed review-writer observed that director Berger “freely mixes in bits from the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Woody Allen.”  The notice had top praise for actors Urie (“charming as hell”), Burton (“superlative double duty”), McGrath (“bluffs and blusters to the hilt”), and Testa (“earns big laughs just by changing the pitch of her voice”).  Adam Feldman of Time Out New York warned, “A play that depicts a politician as a greedy, vindictive, incompetent boob desperate to ingratiate himself to the leader of Russia . . . may no longer sound like comedy”; however, he continued that “humor is doled out generously in” the Government Inspector revival as “zippily adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher.”  The man from TONY described Distler’s set as evoking “a cartoon in the Sunday funny papers” and reported that the “talented cast of 14 commits hard to fill out its panels.”  He concluded, “Although the play’s lampoon of corruption is wide-ranging, it is tempered by the jovial spirit of farce, which feels like a mercy.  There’s a lot to be said for shouting, but sometimes you just need to laugh.”

In the low-scoring review (40) on Front Row Center,  Tulis McCall (who posted the same notice on New York Theatre Guide) proclaimed, “There are two delicious reasons to see Red Bull’s The Government Inspector”: Michael Urie and Arnie Burton.  She gushed over Urie’s act-one performance—“He is quick.  He is nimble.  And if there had been a candlestick he would have jumped over it”—but then backed off.  “Urie does appear in the second act, but because his scenes depend on the actors with whom he is partnered, the steam runs out quickly,” McCall lamented.  “No one, with the occasional exception of Mary Testa, who knows from timing, seems to have a clue what is happening.”  She blamed director Berger for a production that “feels flat and heavy” and, except for Urie and Burton, a cast that “seems to be playing in what we thin[k] of as the broad style of 19th century melodramas.”  She asserted, “There is no nuance, no inner life, no spark.”  Hatcher’s “text as written is either a poor translation or the original was as dull as a box of rocks.”  Like me, though, the FRC reviewer found, “The two-storied set is awkward to look at, and confines everyone to the equivalent of a long hallway.”  She returned to Urie and Burton, however, for additional and abundant praise.  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that the Red Bull revival of The Government Inspector “is loaded with laughs; but, like all good comedies, even those going way over the top, it's underpinned by all too real relevancy.”  Hatcher’s script is “smartly modernized and streamlined” and Berger’s production “land[s] every joke and double entendre.”  In direct contrast to her colleague at FRC, Sommer raved, “What a cast!  What a clever set!  What witty plot and humor supporting costumes!”  Though she did find the comedy “perhaps a tad too TV-sitcomish,” the CU reviewer felt that “for all the vaudevillian shtick, the terrific actors manage to keep their characters’ excesses within the realm of relatable reality.” 

TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart, calling The Government Inspector “uproarious” and Hatcher’s adaptation “irreverent and highly watchable,” affirmed that the Red Bull company “captures Gogol’s mischievous frivolity.”  Stewart heaped deserved praise on the whole cast whose “physical performances stand out,” and reported that director Berger “creates [an] atmosphere of lunacy through a surprisingly compelling mixture of slapstick comedy and operatic design” for his “zippy” production.  On Broadway World, Michael Dale labeled Gogol’s play a “rip-roaring classic” and Berger’s revival “a gloriously silly mounting.”  Hatcher’s adaptation is “punchline-laden,” but Berger “loads up the evening with terrific sight gags and wacky antics performed by a top shelf cast.” 

“Hilarity reigns in this madcap revival of” The Government Inspector, wrote Darryl Reilly on TheaterScene.net; “It’s a Mel Brooks-style presentation with coarseness, slapstick, pratfalls and gags galore.”  Hatcher’s adaptation is “frothy” and “jocularly crammed with one-liners, zingers, anachronisms and double entendres” and Berger’s staging is “fast-paced” and “an exuberant amalgam of physical and verbal virtuosity combined with visual flair.”  Singling out all the principals for special praise, Reilly labeled the ensemble “dynamic,” adding that they “all excel with their loony turns.”  The review-writer for TheaterScene.net concluded, “This highly entertaining Red Bull Theater production is a wonderful opportunity to experience the play’s timeless splendor.”  Joel Benjamin characterized the Red Bull revival of the play on Theater Pizzazz as “a pleasantly chaotic production” given an “outrageously farcical staging.”  With “a cast of gung-ho actors who have no fear of being over-the-top silly,” each of whom he compliments, Benjamin found that “Berger might have pulled in some of the high spirited performances.”  Nonetheless, the TP reviewer concluded that “the overall mood was consistent and the pacing remarkable.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller asserted that Gogol’s comedy “has been given the full ‘Marxist’ treatment by Red Bull Theater” and Berger—but he assured us he meant Groucho, Harpo, and Chico (what, no Gummo and Zeppo?), “whose style of zany buffoonery is echoed in the show from start to end.”  Miller pointed out that “everything here is thoroughly and unabashedly soaked in slapstick, farce, and low comedy.”  Having set up the premise, Berger’s Government Inspector “quickly descends (or ascends) into full-blown madness and mayhem.”  The TB review-writer summed up with: “All in all, Jesse Berger and Red Bull Theater have put together a marvelous romp of a production, which boasts richly comical performances by its wild and woolly cast” and ended by recommending, “If you are in the mood for good, silly fun, The Government Inspector will more than fill the bill.”  Ron Cohen of TheaterScene.com (not to be confused with TheaterScene.net, above) called the Red Bull revival of The Government Inspector “a rollicking good time” and labeled the production an “exuberant mounting” of the play.  Hatcher’s “sprightly” adaptation “keeps things in 19th Century Russia, but gives the dialogue a bright contemporary spin” and director Berger “demonstrates a grand flair for comedy in his appropriate anything-for-a-laugh staging” with a cast of “superlative farceurs.”  Cohen singled out several of the principal actors for individual praise, especially Urie and McGrath, but affirmed, “Just about everybody contributes to the hilarity.”  The review-writer observed that “the bits come so thick and fast, you don’t have time to ponder the misfires,” but he had this advice to theatergoers: “Grin and bear them.” 

The Huffington Post published two notices for The Government Inspector; the first one is from Steven Suskin, who quipped:

And now we have graft, greed, bribery, cupidity and all-round corruption.  No, not in our local city hall; nor the halls of various congresses and executive branches, neither.  At least not specifically.  The vile misdeeds are purported to take place in Russia, although our present-day leader’s buddy-in-chief needn’t take offence or send out “fake” reviews from fake drama critics. 

That’s, of course, because it’s all in the 19th-century farce, The Government Inspector.  “Gogol’s satire remains razor-sharp . . .,” reported Suskin, “and Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation . . . contemporizes the humor while keeping the action in Gogol’s dusty old provincial town.”  The Red Bull production is “resplendent” and the actors “[a]ll feast on the festivities, and the pleasure is ours.”  Suskin lauded the entire cast and reported that Berger “does a thoroughly assured job, wrangling his clowns and keeping the laughter percolating.”  He labeled Hatcher’s adaptation “canny” and concluded, “All in all, the Red Bull Inspector General [sic] is bright, funny and as refreshing as a bowl of cold summer borscht crowned by two dollops of sour cream.”  (A note to Suskin, however: Russian borscht is a heavy soup of meat and vegetables, served hot as a whole meal.  That cold soup, presumably the one made from beets—it’s, ummm, Polish!) 

In HP’s second review, Michael Giltz, after giving a short disquisition on why stakes are high in comedy, called Berger’s The Government Inspector an “amiable, too-soft revival” that “remains this side of great, despite some strong lead actors and a classic text.”  Giltz felt that “an essential tension, the desperation that drives the best comedy is lacking.”  The problem?  “Quite simply, the cast is having too much fun.”  According to this HP writer, “It means we have fun too, but not as much as we’d have if every member of the cast feared for their life.”  Essentially Giltz asserted that everything comes too easily for all the characters in the play, and that while “a sense of anarchy builds, . . .  the sense of characters under siege does not.”  In the end, when the reveal happens, the “comedic feeling of ‘My God, their every sin has been witnessed’—or even ‘uh-oh’—does not arise.”  He applauded the principal actors, but added that “everyone else . . . fades into the background.”  (Giltz split over Burton—“good” as Osip, “bad” as the “tired gay cliche of a” Postmaster.)  He blamed Berger for “the too-friendly atmosphere,” though he liked the “tech elements”—except the two-tiered set because the lower level was abandoned and unused for so much of the play.  (The reviewer wanted to see both levels in use at the same time at some point.)  “Never let them see you sweat,” admonished Giltz, is bad advice for comedy—and he asserted, “Unfortunately, the cast of The Government Inspector remain as cool as cucumbers.”  (Though several reviewers mention the Fawlty Towers episode about which I wrote a bit at the beginning of this report, Giltz was the only one I read who actually drew a comparison between that TV episode and this production of The Government Inspector—and Red Bull’s Government Inspector came out the worse!)