“A Little Hotel on the Side,” the second offering from Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater, is considerably less dreadful than that company’s recent production of “The Crucible.” The Feydeau farce, which Mr. Randall is starring in, is not so entertaining or so well presented that you would actually send anyone to see it, but neither would you feel sorry for anyone who blundered into the Belasco, where it’s running. Of course, “The Crucible” is not a very good play, and the production raised questions about Mr. Randall’s judgment without making you long to see Arthur Miller better served. “Hotel Paradiso” (the original title), which Feydeau wrote with Maurice Desvallieres, is a kind of masterpiece, and enough of its brilliance shines through—particularly in John Mortimer’s highly literate translation—to make one long for a company of greater honesty and subtlety, and for a director wise enough to leave the play’s moral mechanics intact. A good production of Feydeau ought to remind us how much more he has in common with Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton than with Noel Coward. Unfortunately, the current revival, directed by Tom Moore, seems to have been conceived less as a showcase for the playwright than as a vehicle for Mr. Randall himself.
Here he plays Benoit Pinglet, a building contractor whose roving eye and monster wife cause him to seek an assignation with his next-door neighbor’s neglected spouse (Maryann Plunkett). Wandering in and out of Pinglet’s study are the would-be adulteress’s husband (played by an understudy, Bruce Katzman, on the night I attended); a monkish philosophy student (Rob Lowe), whom a concupiscent housemaid (Madeleine Potter) hopes to direct toward more worldly pursuits; and a naïve, stammering widower (Paxton Whitehead) with four young daughters (Siobhan Tull, Kia Graves, Danielle Ferland, and Nell Balaban). Circumstances conspire to land everyone, with the exception of Pinglet’s wife (Lynn Redgrave), at the eponymous hotel, where in the course of a single evening a good time is had by none—including, in the current instance, the audience.
The mistake Mr. Moore has made is not trusting either the text or the audience, and assuming that you have to soup things up with a lot of shtick and slapstick. Like David Jenkins’ tongue-in-cheek sets and Patricia Zipprodt’s unattractive costumes, which seem to be expressing their contempt for the play, everything about the production resembles a cartoon—particularly the performances. If Miss Plunkett and Mr. Whitehead give the only genuinely funny performances, that’s because they’re the only members of the cast who are playing for real: the others are hamming or clowning, trying to evoke some type or striving for a notion of “style.” The relentlessly perky Miss Potter is playing her idea of the French Maid. Mr. Lowe—his normally high voice even higher than usual—is playing his idea of the Sap. (This must be how he views sexual innocence.) Miss Redgrave, hideously got up to look like a sort of balding giantess, is playing the Ogress. Still worse are Patrick Tull, who gives us an under-medicated version of Macbeth’s porter as the hotel manager; Zane Lasky, in the tiny role of a French schoolmaster; Brian Reddy, who comes on to do a brief Jonathan Winters impression; and an amateurish little fellow named Alec Mapa, who does so much mugging as the hotel bellboy as to make the second act an intermittent torment.
Mr. Randall is actually in his element in the midst of all this. Turning Feydeau’s protagonist into a laugh track role, he plays shamelessly to the audience—leaping and lurching about the stage, doing takes and bits, pulling faces, milking every double-entendre to within an inch of its life, and delivering each booming insult out to the house. The audience eats it up. But they’re not having that much fun—partly because it’s boring to be chased.
There’s something wrong with a repertory company that shows its principals a better time than it shows its subscribers. Still, in Miss Plunkett, a woman with irreproachable timing, who can clearly play either pathos or comedy—Mr. Randall has at least one fine repertory actress. And it’s always a treat to see Paxton Whitehead. And if you can pull your mind back a bit from this production—the way you stand back and squint at a painting—it’s possible to imagine the way a good staging of Feydeau would work; it would be a play not about commedia-dell’arte figures but about real people, members of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie, caught up in the whirlwind nightmare of a playwright’s demented vision and, as a result, getting exactly what they deserve.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 10, 1992