Brighton Beach Memoirs Review: Neil Simon’s Nostalgia With An Edge

In a ceremony years ago in which a Broadway theater was being named after him, Neil Simon told the crowd that he should really entitle his next play after himself, “so that there could be ‘Neil Simon’ by Neil Simon at the Neil Simon.” At the time, he didn’t really need to rename anything: Everything on Broadway was Neil Simon. Counting revivals and a couple of ventures Off-Broadway, New York theatergoers have been able to see 40 Neil Simon plays since his Broadway debut with “Come Blow Your Horn” in 1961, surely a record.

Now some 15 years after his last major hit on Broadway we have “The Neil Simon Plays” – those words are actually etched on the glass of the doors at the Nederlander Theater – revivals of two of his three most explicitly autobiographical plays, which will be presented in repertory. The second of these, “Broadway Bound,” is scheduled to open December 10th. The first one, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” has now opened.

The jokes of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” are still very funny, there are still many touching moments, the mixture of drama and comedy is still sometimes awkward. But there is another layer of nostalgia with which this production must contend – not just Neil Simon’s affectionate but not altogether rosy look back at his childhood, but the audience’s now more-timely interest in Depression-era Brooklyn, and also the memory of the original 1983 production, which marked the Broadway debut of Matthew Broderick.

Newcomer Noah Robbins plays the part that Broderick originated, Eugene Morris Jerome, an obvious stand-in for the playwright, who narrates this play that takes place in 1937. When he addresses the audience, the words are supposedly coming from his “memoirs,” sentences scrawled by a 15-year-old in one of those black and white cardboard composition notebooks that record his “unbelievable, fantastic and completely private thoughts” as well as the goings-on in his family.

Here is the first of the many times he addresses the audience directly:

It is through his eyes, and his wise-cracking mouth, that we are introduced to the six other members of his family. There is his mother, Kate Jerome, who he believes picks on him unfairly. Judging by their exchanges, however, she may have some legitimate grounds for complaint as well:
Kate: How many times have I told you not to leave your things around the house?
Eugene: 109.
Kate: What?
Eugene: You said yesterday, “I told you a hundred and nine times not to leave your things around the house.”
There is his widowed and nearly destitute aunt who moved in more than three years earlier with her two daughters. one of whom Eugene resents because of her (dubious) illnesses, the other of whom he lusts after guiltily. There is his older brother Stanley, whom he alternately worships and hates, and who is frequently getting into trouble and trying to find noble ways out of it. There is his father, a decent man who has trouble making ends meet and must come home from a long day working two jobs and try to solve everybody else’s problems. ”If you didn’t have a problem,” the father only half-jokes, “you wouldn’t live in this house.”
This production of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is directed by David Cromer, who is responsible for the widely-praised production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” at the Barrow Street Theater, both directing it and starring in it as the Stage Manager. His influence is evident right down to the costumes, designed by Jane Greenwood, and the greater emphasis on the drama. It is especially clear in Laurie Metcalf’s performance as the mother. As with most Neil Simon characters, the mother is not just a human being with struggles, resentments and everyday dreams; she is also a gag machine. The machine here is sacrificed for the sake of a more credible characterization; Metcalf, best-known for her role in the television show “Roseanne” as the sister of the title character, plays less of a cartoon Jewish mother and more of a harried one, too busy to be broad. (The only thing overly broad about her performance, and those of most of the rest of the cast, is their unsteady stab at a New Yawk accent). The lessening of caricature is not a great loss, but what is in its place would have worked better if Simon were as adept in his dramatic scenes as he is in his comedy. Yes, there is an unusual complexity to his characters in “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” but there is also an awful piling up of travails, screaming confrontations and emotional breakdowns and breakthroughs for a play that is supposed to take place over just two ordinary days a week apart.

Noah Robbins, who more or less must carry the play, has the opposite problem of Laurie Metcalf. Too often he plays things too broadly, as if overly eager for the laughs.

I laughed at a line in his actor’s bio: he “most recently appeared Off-Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway as Max Bialystock in his high school’s production of The Producers.” That’s the very musical of course in which Matthew Broderick originated the role of Leo Bloom on Broadway. In Frank Rich’s review of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” in 1983, he wrote: “As Eugene, Mr. Broderick possesses both the polished performing skills and the magnetism that are essential to keep ”Brighton Beach Memoirs” rolling. But he sometimes has the too-calculated delivery of a stand-up comic, along with an odd, middle-aged posture that eerily resembles Walter Matthau’s.” The review by Walter Kerr (a critic who is himself now the name of a Broadway theater) more simply singled out “the most remarkable Matthew Broderick.” Robbins is 19 years old, clearly intelligent, eager and appealing. But he is no Matthew Broderick. What began as a cute performance to me became at times cloying, all the more so for seeming out of sync with the more realistic work of the rest of the cast. (Maybe a Matthau slouch might have helped.)

Far better served by the playwright and the director is Santino Fontana as the older brother Stanley Jerome, who has the earnestness, world-shattering urgency, and ersatz sophistication of a young man of 18 1/2 learning how to be an adult. Fontana is able to charm the audience and still make the character believable. The stand-out performer in the cast, though, is Dennis Boutsikaris as the father, precisely because he doesn’t stand out; his is a low-key portrayal of a man weighed down by his responsibilities. (As his son Eugene observes, “he was born at the age of 42.”) Watch the subtly stiff way he walks when we first see him. This was so convincing that I assumed this was just the way the actor walks…until he walked differently in a subsequent scene.

In this first of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Eugene loves baseball and loves to write, and is not sure whether he will grow up to become a New York Yankee or a writer. Before we even get to “Broadway Bound” (or the Eugene play that is not being revived, “Biloxi Blues”) the audience certainly knows, though. Part of the satisfaction of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is glimpsing what went into the creation of Neil Simon by Neil Simon at the Neil Simon, a portrait of a comic artist as a funny young man.

I’ll end with this sometimes annoying promotional YouTube video entitled “Neil Simon’s Broadway” because of the scene in it from “The Odd Couple” with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. I defy you not to laugh out loud.

Update: The show’s producers have announced the closing of the show a week after its opening, and the cancellation of “Broadway Bound”, because of weak ticket sales.

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Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon
at the Nederlander Theater
208 West 41st Street
Directed by David Cromer
Scenic design: John Lee Beatty
Costume design: Jane Greenwood
Lighting design: Brian MacDevitt
Sound design: Fitz Patton and Josh Schmidt
Hair and wig design: Tom Watson
Cast
Laurie Metcalf as Kate Jerome
Dennis Boutsikaris as Jack Jerome
Santino Fontana as Stanley Jerome
Jessica Hecht as Blanche Morton
Gracie Bea Lawrence as Laurie Morton
Noah Robbins as Eugene Jerome
Alexandra Socha as Nora Morton
Running time is two hours and 30 minutes, which includes one 15-minute intermission
Ticket prices range from $65.00 to $100.00; $30.00 Student Rush

Photo of Neil Simon by Aubrey Reuben. All other photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown.