Oct 09, 2014
onRating: B+
It’s taken more than three decades for Terrence McNally’s backstage comedy It’s Only a Play to make it to Broadway. The show was bound for the Great White Way in 1978 until a disastrous Philadelphia tryout derailed those plans. But McNally never completely abandoned the project, which is set at the posh Manhattan townhouse of a Broadway producer as the cast and creative team gather for an opening-night bash to await the reviews. In the mid-’80s, there was a successful Off Broadway revival with James Coco, Christine Baranski, and Joanna Gleason. And now it’s landed on Broadway at last in a hilarious and star-packed evening of theater in-jokes that often plays like a nonmusical version of Forbidden Broadway.
McNally has completely overhauled his original script, stuffing it with up-to-date references to everything from Lady Gaga to Kelly Ripa, and from Matilda to the upcoming revivals of A Delicate Balance and The Elephant Man. There are also plenty of way-inside punchlines for theater chatroom habitués: Bonus laughs for those who know that Moose Murders was a notorious Broadway flop or that if you have to pick a hometown for the show’s nervous playwright the natural choice is Corpus Christi.
Director Jack O’Brien’s production reteams Tony winners Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who these days pack a bigger punch at the box office than in terms of natural onstage chemistry. The two play old friends—Lane as an actor who’s passed up the lead role in the play-within-a-play to continue his hit TV series, and Broderick as the anxious playwright whose first big hit was a star-making vehicle for Lane’s character. But while Lane commands the stage with his quippy narcissism (abetted by some of McNally’s strongest meta-jokes), Broderick continues his recent run of stiff, somnambulent, and overly mannered stage performances. The energy and pace of the show deflate whenever he opens his mouth. Worse, he’s saddled with some of the lengthiest speeches in the show, overly earnest paeans to the theater and Why It Matters. (Even his quips, like one about an imagined revival of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters starring the Kardashians, don’t so much land as disintegrate on impact.)