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[Theater reviews]

Unfunny Clowns
This revival is strictly for Selleck fans

BY CAROLYN CLAY

A Thousand Clowns
By Herb Gardner. Directed by John Rando. Set design by Allen Moyer. Costumes by Martin Pakledinaz. Lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Sound by Peter Fitzgerald. With Tom Selleck, Nicolas King, Bradford Cover, Barbara Garrick, Robert Lupone, and Mark Blum. At the Shubert Theatre through July 1.

For my money, A Thousand Clowns is about 999 too many. No offense to Tom Selleck, whose abiding affection for the 1962 Herb Gardner play is apparently behind this Broadway-bound revival. Anchoring a passable production of the creaky commercial comedy, the star of TV’s Magnum P.I. and movies including Three Men and a Baby proves an affable stage presence. But I wouldn’t cross the street to watch the incomparable Jason Robards, who starred in the 1965 movie, plow his way through this dated, largely unfunny material. “I could have had an O’Neill,” I would find myself thinking, in V8-commercial fashion. Hey, even here I’m thinking, at the sight of erstwhile TV hunk Selleck sans his moustache and Hawaiian shirt, “Get me rerun.”

A Thousand Clowns was Tony-winner (for I’m Not Rappaport) Gardner’s first Broadway hit; opening in 1962, it ran for 428 performances. But its tale of an iconoclastic, unemployed children’s-show writer who is dunned by Social Services because the living situation he provides for his precocious 10-year-old nephew entails “severe domestic instability” exudes essence-of-mothball. Murray Burns, living on deli and failing to seek employment, is Rosie O’Donnell compared to what they’re taking kids away from today. And the children’s show he’s fleeing, which features a bullying, needy guy in a chipmunk suit, wouldn’t make local-access cable. The straitlaced Social Services suit is a caricatured stiff (with lines like “God save you from your vision, Mr. Burns!”). As for Leo, the man within the chipmunk, even his unfunniness isn’t funny.

The question is raised, not illegitimately, whether Murray is some kind of conformity-bucking hero or just self-indulgent. What he wants for nephew Nick — that he understand it’s worth the trouble to “goose the world” — is hardly visionary. But even if you find Murray as likable as you’re supposed to, it’s intolerable that his journey from rebellion to responsibility should take almost three hours, complete with two intermissions and a seemingly endless loop of John Philip Sousa. How can a commercial comedy, however laden with poignance, a moral, and paeans to mustard and afternoon movies (“lovely and a little damp, the dialogue falling like rain on a roof”), be this cumbersome?

Directed by John Rando, whose last Broadway outing was the critically panned but apparently successful Neil Simon comedy The Dinner Party (it’s still running), the production grounds the play in its three-decade-old New York setting. Murray and Nick occupy a grimy one-room apartment (with kitchen and bath) that doesn’t even by a gleam-of-the-eye have “co-op” in its future. Selleck’s Murray sports a retro yet insouciant angora cardigan and beat-up fedora. Nick’s vastly inappropriate (in the eyes of Welfare Satan) toy is a 1950s-racy statue of a woman with light-up breasts. But A Thousand Clowns doesn’t really make it as a period piece, and the one-liners hardly come at you the way they do in Neil Simon. What laugh lines there are suffer from the fact that Nicolas King, though cute as “grotesque cherub” Nick, cannot always be understood.

Selleck brings a James Garnerish persona to Murray, a larger-than-life guy who seems cramped by the cluttered apartment, his agent brother’s glossy rectangle of an office, and the trap of conventional nine-to-five life (insofar as writing for a chipmunk conforms to said existence). But the actor relies on an easy charisma that misses the role’s curmudgeonly aspect. Barbara Garrick looks like Office Barbie as the social worker Murray lures from the path and then romances. But she brings some throaty personality to the part. Theater vets Robert Lupone and Mark Blum also do what they can to brighten the dapper, pragmatic agent and the neurotic, untalented kids’-show star. But A Thousand Clowns is the sort of early-’60s play that makes you real happy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was about to dawn.

Issue Date: June 28- July 5, 2001