Theatre in Review: Living on Love (Longacre Theatre)We're doing a lot of time traveling on Broadway these days. Last week, It Shoulda Been You hearkened back to the '60s, the last days of the sex comedy. Now comes Living on Love, which wants to take us back to the screwball farces that turned up every season a decade or two earlier. Joe DiPietro's comedy is set in 1957, but something tells me that even Broadway audiences of the '50s might have passed on this little item. At one point, one of the characters praises a new novel, exclaiming, "All it's missing are plot and characters!" I know how she feels. The play has an obvious antecedent in Once More, With Feeling!, Harry Kurnitz's 1958 comedy about a monstrously egotistical symphony conductor and his equally temperamental wife, who wreak havoc on their entourage. Living on Love gives us a monstrously egotistical symphony conductor and his equally temperamental wife, an opera diva, who wreak havoc on their entourage. Vito De Angelis is the conductor, an unreconstructed Italian who mangles the English language while angling to manhandle the nearest female. (He tells tales of seducing entire opera choruses -- in a single afternoon.) At the moment, he is supposed to be dictating his memoirs to Robert, his ghost writer (or, as Vito puts it, his "spooky helper"), but, after several weeks, they haven't gotten past page two. Robert is the eighth in a series of ghosts, all of whom have fled Vito in despair. ("Truman Capote still has a scar," someone notes, in one of the author's less successful attempts at name-dropping.) The situation is further complicated when Raquel, Vito's wife, returns from her latest tour. Robert has long adored Raquel from afar, and, never losing an opportunity to make Vito jealous, Raquel plays up to the young writer. When Iris Peabody, a steely young editorial assistant from Little, Brown, shows up, demanding that Vito deliver a manuscript or return his advance (which, of course, has been spent), Vito, with romance in his eyes, decides Iris will be his collaborator. Raquel, in revenge, calls up Little, Brown and gets a contract for her memoirs, which she intends to write with Robert. It is decided that the young people will move in, the better for Vito and Raquel to prey upon them. Naturally, nobody makes any progress: Iris can't tie down Vito any more than Robert could, and Robert is forced to listen, aghast, as Raquel spins a wild series of fantasies about her life. ("I was about to tell you about my missionary work in the Congo.") What follows is a game of competitive romance, as Vito and Raquel all but throw themselves at Iris and Robert, who, in turn, start thinking fondly of each other. The play, adapted from a Garson Kanin comedy that closed out of town 30 years ago, wants to be an evening of high-style amusement, but DiPietro sacrifices any credibility in favor of setting up the dueling romances that constitute the central conceit. Even a comedy this frothy must be rooted in some kind of psychological truth -- with it, a playwright can get away with murder. We need to see the sexual jealousy and fear of aging that drives the competition between Vito and Raquel -- points that the author alludes to without really dramatizing. The rather prim and severe Iris hardly seems like the kind of woman Vito would chase so avidly, even if just to get Raquel's attention. Raquel romances Robert by dressing up as Mimi from La Bohème, instructing him to be her Rodolfo by removing his shirt and covering his chest with olive oil. The action climaxes with two candlelit dinners unfolding on opposite sides of the same drawing room, a setup so flagrantly unbelievable that it borders on the insulting. Pacing the action is a parade of gags, some of them older than Verdi. "Apparently, the Maestro is the reason J.D. Salinger went into seclusion," Iris says, apropos of nothing. Producing a 900-page manuscript, Robert says that he has long dreamed of writing the great American novel. And the title would be The Great American Novel, notes Robert, who apparently believes in truth in advertising. Vito, told that Iris has arrived to see him, slicks back his hair with the nearest thing, which is maple syrup, which allows Iris, in an embrace with Vito, to note that he smells of Vermont. The one indisputable thing Living on Love has going for it is Douglas Sills as Vito. From the moment he emerges from his bedroom, clad in silk pajamas and robe, a sleep mask on his head, sunglasses covering his eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lips, sporting hair that looks like it has been through a Kansas tornado, the actor lends an authentic, and hilarious, Sicilian intensity to everything he does. Whether flying into a rage at any mention of Leonard Bernstein ("Prostitute, prostitute," he mutters when West Side Story is brought up), tying up his robe to rein in his figure before greeting a young guest, or filling a cup of espresso with nearly ten spoonfuls of sugar, then letting his entire body register the caffeine-and-sugar jolt, he is a pure delight. Renée Fleming makes her Broadway debut as Raquel and at times her inexperience shows. She has her moments, capturing Raquel's dizzily oblivious, self-adoring side: Trilling a few high notes, she enters the room, saying, "Did I just hear the birds sing? No, that was me." And she gets a laugh when, recalling her marriage, she says, "We were going to have children -- but, unfortunately, we forgot." But the lady surprisingly lacks the live-wire intensity that the role demands. "Keep in mind, I've played Medea; I know how to play a woman scorned," she says -- but, really, she doesn't. Nor is she believable giving Sills the kiss of death from Tosca, or hurling her objects in a moment of fury. (Her best moment is when she sits down and quietly explains that opera creates a world that, to her, is preferable to real life.) Fleming seems to be having a good time, especially when swanning about in full opera costume, carrying her little dog, Puccini, who is fitted out with an Aida-style headdress, and it would be nice if more of that was shared with the audience. (It doesn't help that the revival of On the Twentieth Century, at the Roundabout, features Kristin Chenoweth and Peter Gallagher providing plenty of show-stopping hilarity as a marriage of equally swollen showbiz egos. Sills and Fleming pale in comparison.) Robert and Iris should be the normal characters swept up in Vito and Raquel's emotional storms, but, as written and played, they both come across as borderline basket cases, thereby providing little comic contrast. Jerry O'Connell overplays Robert's perpetual state of shock, and Anna Chlumsky's Iris is full of nervous tics. (Arriving to confront Vito, she asks for a glass of water with gin in it, following it with a glass of gin.) Neither character has much charm, which damages our interest in their budding romance. Blake Hammond and Scott Robertson are moderately amusing as Vito and Raquel's Tweedledee and Tweedledum manservants, but they are saddled with a personal revelation that is, to say the least, extremely unlikely for 1957. Kathleen Marshall, taking a rare break from staging musicals, takes a thoroughly mechanical approach; not until the play's final moments, when Vito and Raquel are forced to look at themselves in the mirror, does anyone seem like a real human being. At least, however, the director has provided her cast with a deluxe production design. Derek McLane has conjured up a French provincial drawing room in gray, cream, and gold, with plenty of photos on the walls, a glass étagère loaded with snow globes, and crystal sconces on the walls. It's a knockout, exactly the kind of pricey hothouse that these rarified creatures would inhabit. Peter Kaczorowski's lighting adds to the feeling of well-heeled comfort. Scott Lehrer's sound design provides reinforcement for the hit list of classical selections that cover the play's amusingly staged scene changes. Michael Krass' costumes occasionally seem a little over the top, even for a clothes horse like Raquel, but they certainly add to the extravagant mood on stage. But Living on Love is far too knowing about its screwball status, allowing everyone to giddily strike poses rather than playing it for real and letting us discover the fun for ourselves. The characters on stage are so busy amusing themselves, they hardly need us at all. -- David Barbour 
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