Theatre in Review: Three Men on a Horse (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row) God love James Murtagh. He barges on stage late in the action of Three Men on a Horse and wakes up a sleeping production with a pure jolt of comic adrenaline. He plays Mr. Carver, an irascible, superannuated greeting card mogul; he's in a state of panic because his star writer, a mouse disguised as a man named Erwin, has gone missing just before the Mother's Day deadline. Given Erwin's ability to turn out, in a single day, 50 brief verses of the most staggering banality, this is a crisis indeed. Convinced that Erwin has been spirited away by a rival firm, Carver invades the poor man's home, terrorizing Audrey, Erwin's even mousier wife, in the process. It's a thing of beauty to see Murtagh, muttering his lines in a furious monotone, his eyes darting in a frenzy of paranoia, his spine bent under the weight of sheer apoplectic rage, as he proceeds to case the joint in search of his errant versifier. He treats us to a genuine, honest-to-God conniption fit; his emotions are so outsized, you'd think Erwin had escaped from a chain gang. The actor appears four or five times in Act III, bringing fresh bursts of laughter with him each time. It's too bad some way couldn't be found to inject Murtagh into the first two acts. Three Men on a Horse was a Depression-era Broadway blockbuster, racking up 835 performances and advancing the careers of Shirley Booth and Sam Levene. (A young man named Garson Kanin was in the cast, as well.) There was a popular film and the play was twice musicalized, as Banjo Eyes, with Eddie Cantor, and Let it Ride, with George Gobel. More recent revivals have failed to take off, however, for reasons become clear in the current TACT revival. Although George Abbott, who co-wrote the play with John Cecil Holm, was a master of comic construction, Three Men on a Horse may be too carefully put together; you have to endure the exposition-heavy and laugh-free first act before it begins to resemble anything like an entertainment. The authors take their sweet time establishing Erwin's frugal, henpecked existence in Ozone Heights, New Jersey before revealing that he has an uncanny ability to predict the outcome of any horse race. (Not that he bets on the ponies -- that would spoil everything, he says.) An equal amount of labor goes into getting Erwin into a Manhattan hotel bar, where he meets Patsy, a down-on-his-luck gambler and his cronies. Once Patsy and company get a load of Erwin's gift for doping out the winners, they all but hold him hostage in a hotel room, following his advice and giving him ten percent of the take. As the pace picks up, so do the laughs, but it's a long haul. Ideally, farce should begin on a low-key note and ramp up by degrees -- but this one is stuck in idle for so long, it risks losing the audience altogether. It's just barely possible that, in superbly timed and deadpan staging, Three Men on a Horse might still have that old magic. In Scott Alan Evans' production, however, the actors give in to the impulse to play funny. As Erwin and Audrey, Geoffrey Molloy and Becky Baumwoll are like a little toy couple, full of fussy mannerisms; Molloy's line readings sound alarmingly like Matthew Broderick doing one of his sad-sack characters. Similarly, Gregory Salata's Patsy is all surface mannerisms, and Julianna Zinkel's Mabel is a carbon copy of Guys and Dolls' Miss Adelaide, but without any comic zing. Because we're so aware that everyone is acting, Erwin's encounters with Patsy and his cronies lack any sense of menace, which further undermines the play's humor. (Even a neatly staged bit of farce in which Patsy apparently catches Erwin and Mabel in flagrante delicto, falls flat; as played here, Patsy wouldn't hurt a fly.) Scott Schafer amuses as Audrey's self-righteous brother, who is convinced that Erwin has flown the coop with a fortune racing winnings. Evans might have spent more time fine-tuning the performances and less time focusing on such ephemera as a pre-show "horse race," with puppets and betting sheets. The script calls for three full sets, a tall order in a Theatre Row venue, which, in Brett J. Banakis' design, results in such oddities as a living room without any furniture in it. (There is a nifty show curtain, however, that consists of a patchwork of '30s era advertising.) Martha Hally's costumes include a number of authentic-looking period men's suits; she also contrasts Audrey's housewifely outfits with Mabel's blowsier wardrobe. The lighting, by Mary Louise Geiger, and sound, by Daryl Bornstein, are perfectly okay; Bornstein's playlist of swingy period pop tunes adds some festivity to the proceedings. But, at least as staged here, Three Men on a Horse barely gets out of the starting gate. Given the company's riotous staging of The Late Christopher Bean, another '30s comedy, a couple of seasons ago, I'm inclined to blame the script. There are plenty of other scripts from the era worth looking at. How about Boy Meets Girl I think it has a nifty role for James Murtagh.-- David Barbour 
|
