Putting On Too Much of ‘The Ritz’

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The New York Sun

Prepare for a shocking amount of flab on display at “The Ritz.”

This extra weight, to be clear, won’t be found on the show’s cast: As the ads for this stillborn revival of Terrence McNally’s 1975 gaysex farce promise, the towel-clad habitués of the titular bathhouse wouldn’t know a complex carbohydrate if it crashed into their six-, eight-, and 12-pack abs.

But in case their usual regimens at Crunch or Equinox weren’t rigorous enough, director Joe Mantello has asked these men and women (mostly men) to carry an exhausting amount of stage business, dated punch lines, and leaden exposition. Mr. McNally has subsequently distilled the laughter as well as the loneliness of 20th-century gay life into several superb plays, including “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and his rich libretti to “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “A Man of No Importance.” But “The Ritz” coasts for dismayingly long stretches on its daring-for-its-time subject matter, the unabashed hedonism of the pre-AIDS bathhouse era. It would take more than a trip to the steam room to burn off the excess in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s underdressed but overstuffed production.

By populating the Ritz with two heavyset heterosexuals, one of whom wants to kill the other, Mr. McNally conflated the tried-and-true genres of fish-out-of-water comedy and mixed-identity farce. The marked man, Gaetano Proclo (Kevin Chamberlin), is a mild-mannered galoot from Cleveland whose sin was to marry into the Vespucci family. Carmine Vespucci (Lenny Venito) has never forgiven Proclo for marrying his sister, Vivian (Ashlie Atkinson), and Proclo’s unwitting arrival at the Ritz — Proclo naively thinks it’s like a YMCA, and not the Village People sort — gives Carmine the grounds he needs for an honor killing.

In a not-so-subtle spin on the more common varieties of prejudice, the gay patrons have a hard time keeping the straight people straight: Proclo and Carmine are constantly being confused for one another, and the arrival of the hot-tempered (and unsvelte) Vivian only adds to the confusion. Added into the anarchic mix are the talent-free nightclub singer Googie Gomez (Rosie Perez), who has been told that one or more of the interlopers is a Broadway producer; the libidinous but easily underestimated Chris (Brooks Ashmanskas), a one-man parade who flounces his way into the middle of the action; an avowed chubby-chaser named Claude (Patrick Kerr), and Michael Brick (Terrence Riordan), a hunky detective who has been hired by Carmine to catch Proclo in flagrante delicto.

Like any good farce, “The Ritz” boasts plenty of slammable doors and skimpy clothes, courtesy of the inventive Scott Pask and William Ivey Long, respectively. (Come to think of it, those towels are closer to washcloths.) And like any good farce — and like plenty of bad ones — it also peppers this plot with running gags that resurface with only the slightest variations. The continued misperception that Googie is a transvestite is one such trope, along with Claude’s continued attempts to woo his portly conquests with a cracked rendition of “Jelly Roll Baby.”

Here is where a director’s skills are put to the test: Even when bits like these aren’t that funny inherently, a skilled farceur structures the pacing such that their impact is cumulative. You see them coming from a mile away, and yet they still shock and delight upon arrival. George Abbott and George Kauffman reportedly had this ability in spades; Jerry Zaks and Susan Stroman are among their modern-day torchbearers.

Mr. Mantello clearly knows his way around comedy in its more verbal, emotionally intricate varieties: Witness his success with the likes of Richard Greenberg (“Take Me Out”), David Sedaris (“The Santaland Diaries”), and even Mr. McNally (“Love! Valour! Compassion!”). But he sucked the humor out of a far superior farce, “The Odd Couple,” in the misbegotten 2005 revival, and he meets with even less success this time. The rare moments where “The Ritz” explodes into door-slamming, bed-hiding mayhem are agonizingly labored — the actors practically move their lips counting out the beats as they race to their spots. And those running gags stumble out of the gate, starting out mildly amusing at best and fading from there.

He proves similarly luckless in hammering his cast into any sort of cohesive whole. Despite an admirable go-for-broke physicality, Ms. Perez is a largely incomprehensible blur as Googie. For every bit of her physical schtick that hits the mark, two or three others fly into the air before sputtering to the ground. As the hapless Proclo, Mr. Chamberlin earns the viewer’s sympathy early on with a few well-timed slow burns but ultimately allows himself to get caught up in the sputtering chaos. And judging from the stiff line readings from much of the hardbodied supporting cast, acting ability made up only a fraction of the casting process. (Nevermind that the mid-1970s aesthetic ran toward far more body hair and far fewer washboard stomachs than are on display here.)

The well-known Broadway gadfly Seth Rudetsky has contributed an enjoyably dreadful nightclub medley for Googie; while the garbled lyrics and fluffed high notes aren’t terribly original, he scores points for making the groovy “39 Lashes” instrumental from “Jesus Christ Superstar” sound even more dated than usual. (Mr. Rudetsky also contributes a musical theater in-joke in Act II that I won’t spoil. I will say, though, that it’s the first truly original Bob Fosse homage I’ve seen in at least two dozen attempts.)

His show-queen antics look downright butch next to Mr. Ashmanskas’s wildly flamboyant Chris, who can barely walk without adding a step-ball-change combination. Thirty years of trading on this swishy stereotype have yet to dull its appeal when it’s done well, and Mr. Ashmanskas does it very well. But when the most retrograde and predictable aspects of a production are the only ones that resonate 32 years later, it’s time to hit the showers.

Until December 2 (254 W. 54th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-719-1300).


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