Neil Simon Flop May Be a Case of the Missing ‘Wow’
The cast of the revival of “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” a Neil Simon play that closed after a week at the Nederlander Theater.
Neil Simon was the crossover comedy king of Broadway and Hollywood for three decades, beginning when “Barefoot in the Park” and three other major shows overlapped in New York in the 1960s.
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The Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Neil Simon.
But comedy is changing on Broadway, and on Sunday one of Mr. Simon’s most-produced plays in the last 25 years, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” became one of the biggest commercial flops on Broadway in recent memory. It closed a week after it opened, shocking many in the theater world, not least the writer himself.
“I’m dumbfounded,” Mr. Simon, 82, who has won a Pulitzer and three Tony Awards, said in an interview. “After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.”
What went wrong with “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is a case study in success and failure on Broadway today. There were no big stars like Jude Law in the current commercial hit “Hamlet,” there was no marketing campaign that framed the Simon play as a can’t-miss theatrical event, and there was no wow factor that brought the period piece to life, like the breakneck pacing of the popular farce “Boeing-Boeing” last year. But the failure also reflects America’s evolving sense of humor and taste.
Broadway shows rarely close a week or less after opening. Those that do — like “Glory Days” in 2008 or “Carrie” in 1988 — were usually killed by reviews that were far worse than those for “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It actually received good reviews, but the play was shuttered because people, for whatever reason, did not want to see the Simon show about a Depression-era family laughing through the tears. The show cost $3 million to produce but never grossed more than $125,000 a week in ticket sales during preview performances — or 15 percent of the maximum possible — an amount that did not even cover running costs.
As for revivals of acclaimed American works like “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” they are hardly out of fashion with Broadway audiences. “South Pacific,” “Hair” and “West Side Story” are doing well, though musicals are stronger sellers than plays.
“There will always be an audience for a well-done revival of a great musical, but reviving a period-piece play now takes a special alchemy,” said André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, home to “South Pacific.” “A play revival needs to have a strong vision and to give people a reason why they should see it. What’s strange is that everyone I know thought this ‘Brighton Beach’ was wonderful.”
Ben Brantley, the Times theater critic, praised the spontaneity of director David Cromer’s production and “Mr. Simon’s snappy, streamlined dialogue.”
Mr. Simon was a forefather of situation comedy writers, and his scripts for stage and screen were embraced by actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But sitcoms have given way to reality shows like “American Idol,” one-liners to the sardonic humor of “The Office,” and the heavily plotted comedy of Mr. Simon’s film “California Suite” to the animated wit of “Up” and the fratty banter of “The Hangover,” two of the summer’s biggest hits.
“American sensibilities about comedy change so rapidly, especially in the cultural centers on the East Coast and West Coast where people are always looking for the next new style of humor, whereas Neil Simon’s brand of humor is pretty unchanging,” said Susan Koprince, author of “Understanding Neil Simon” and a professor of English at the University of North Dakota.
Mr. Simon’s signature has always been the well-written, straightforward punch line, but new and revived comedies have done best on Broadway lately when they have been dark, satiric and outrageously narcissistic. The recent revivals of the plays “Boeing-Boeing,” “Speed-the-Plow” and “The Norman Conquests” took flight because of fast-paced timing but also had frissons of fear and panic just beneath the surface humor. A mix of comedy and pain also proved potent for the original play “August: Osage County,” while two other new plays, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and “The Little Dog Laughed,” were sharp satires of political terrorism and Hollywood.
While reality shows like “American Idol” and forensic dramas like “NCIS” dominate television today, popular comedies like the traditionally plotted sitcom “Two and a Half Men” and the character-driven “Desperate Housewives” also share sharply written dialogue and recognizable modern characters like those found in “God of Carnage.”
“It’s clear from the ascendancy of certain types of comedy, like the trend exemplified by Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin,’ ‘Knocked Up,’ that what audiences are seeking in humor is getting more raw and edgy than Simon’s work,” said Matthew Maguire, a playwright who is director of the theater program at Fordham University.
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