Review Preview: "The Sunshine Boys"

Sorry to be silent for more than a week, but was transitioning from one Gannett newspaper (Jersey Stages blog host The Courier News) to the Daily Record. But got to New Brunswick Saturday night to catch up with Jack Klugman and Paul Dooley in "The Sunshine Boys."

Nice night out for yours truly and Mrs. Willie, although the town was in a bit of a funk following the ugly Rutgers football loss. By dinner time, though, the streets were full of people. Nice to see downtown N.B. so alive when it's easy to remember when it wasn't a very good idea to be walking down George Street after dark.

Lovely dinner at Soho, just around the corner from George Street Playhouse. Good food, good service and prices were a notch below some of the wonderful, but incredibly expensive Hub City restaurants. Of course, Jersey Stages always reminds readers to budget time for a nice dinner before a show in New Brunswick. The choices are myriad, especially if you're willing to drop $100 on dinner and a bottle of wine.

Oh, yeah, and the show was good too. Here's the Review Preview:

Theater review
If you want to go:
What: “The Sunshine Boys”
When: through Nov.11
Where: George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick
How much: $28 to $64
Info: (73) 246-7717; www.gsponline.org

By WILLIAM WESTHOVEN
Staff Writer
Did you hear the one about Lewis and Clark discovering New Brunswick and marking it on their new map as Exit 9?
The famous explorers also inspired the name of the fictional vaudeville team, Lewis and Clark, aka “The Sunshine Boys,” who are packing them in at George Street Playhouse, N.J. Turnpike Exit 9, in the Hub City of Middlesex County.
Neil Simon’s hilarious and sentimental comedy has its own timeless quality, but Artistic Director David Saint has figuratively tossed the clock out the window, teaming one ageless acting legend with another familiar and respected veteran in the title roles.
Jack Klugman, who starred here last fall in “The Value of Names,” continues to explore his roots as a stage actor, with results that are a privilege to witness. The spry 85-year-old, who once played opposite Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” makes it look almost too easy, as though comic timing was as natural as breathing.
Paul Dooley, one of the most recognizable actors most of us can’t name, is the perfect straight man, calmly serving as the target of Klugman’s comic rage.
After 43 years in the business, Willie Clark (Klugman) and Al Clark (Dooley) are spending their golden years apart. They haven’t even spoken in 11 years, after Al retired before Willie was ready.
We catch up with Willie in 1973, miserably comfortable in his dingy, apartment-style Manhattan hotel room. Willie’s nephew, Ben (Michael Mastro, another veteran New York actor) stocks the pantry during one of his weekly visits, during which he begs his uncle to take better care of himself.
But Willie would rather stay inside, complain and read the obits of his former friends in Variety.
“Look at that, 89 years old” he says, reading one. “He went like that, from nothing.”
Ben also is Willie’s agent, although there’s little work for an aging actor who can’t remember his lines. But Ben’s brought news of a big CBS TV special on the history of comedy, and they want Lewis and Clark.
After much cajoling, and several pages of Simon zingers, Willie reluctantly agrees to the reunion. Ben brings Al up for a rehearsal and the real fun begins.
“I heard your blood doesn’t circulate,” Willie says.
“My blood circulates fine,” Al rebuts. “I’m not saying everywhere …”
Simon’s silly lines are so deceptively simple that many actors turn them into throwaways, knowing if one doesn’t work, there will be plenty more. But Klugman and Dooley are so good at what they do that they don’t even need the lines to get a laugh. One of the funniest scenes in the show is a wordless exercise in which the surly Sunshine boys attempt to set up their famous doctor skit. Each has a sketchy memory of the sketch, and they spend several side-splitting minutes moving chairs around a table until they get it just wrong.
There’s also a quietly funny scene where they mirror mannerisms while sipping tea, never once looking at each other, like an old married couple who have blended into one entity.
Klugman’s voice remains compromised from surgery for throat cancer, scratchy at best and occasionally trailing off to a high-pitched whisper. But the rhythm of his voice, which speeds up when his character is agitated (which is quite often), is familiar as Oscar Madison’s messy bedroom. It helps that all the actors are miked and mixed to the same volume, so every line is clear all the way to the back row.
Ebony Jo-Ann and Peggy Joyce Crosby enrich a supporting cast, respectively playing a sassy home nurse and a shamelessly buxom actress playing a nurse.
A rotating stage brings the audience from Willie’s flat, where most of the action takes place, to the soundstage for a rehearsal of the doctor sketch, which, of course, falls apart as the warring geezers revisit ancient conflicts.
Add a relentless barrage of Jersey Jokes and you have the makings of a show that should back up traffic at Exit 9, which “The Sunshine Boys” appears to be doing. Saturday’s second-week performance drew a full house, so make your reservations early for this limited-run treasure.