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!)
Red Bull's 'Government Inspector' has been extended until 28 August. It will transfer to New World Stages at 340 W 50th St. as of today.
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~Rick