Not Easy to Live With

Living on Love at the Longacre Theatre

Renee Fleming and Douglas Sills in Living on Love.

            From September through February Kaufman and Hart’s 1936 farce You Can’t Take it With You, directed by the masterful Scott Ellis, ran at the Longacre Theatre.  Now, taking one of its stars along (Anna Chlumsky, who replaced Rose Byrne as Alice Sycamore), author Joe DiPietro and director Kathleen Marshall have produced another play on the same stage, which aspires to the same heights as did Kaufman and Hart but rarely if ever succeeds in its ambitions.

            Despite casting buzz about this production, there’s really only performance worth mentioning—Douglas Sills as the aging opera maestro Vito De Angelis (who insists on being referred to just as the Maestro), who sails into the parlor of his beautiful apartment in an ill-fitting sleeping mask and an orange silk robe.  (Set design is by Derek McLane, costumes by Michael Krass; both do an excellent job of conjuring an era that is never really fleshed out by the material.)  It’s 1957, and De Angelis is driving his memoir’s ghostwriter, Robert Samson (Jerry O’Connell, not trying hard enough) nuts with his habits of arriving late and refusing to discuss any aspects of his life but the (probably inflated) number of women he’s slept with.  Nine weeks in, Samson has written two pages, and he’s had enough.  Pausing only to convey his admiration for the Maestro’s wife, the legendary opera diva Raquel De Angelis (Renee Fleming – more on her later), Samson quits, leaving the Maestro to puff on a cigarette and peer at the paper through his aviator glasses like an anachronistic Hunter S. Thompson. 

As a parting shot, Samson hisses, “You’ve been living in this country for years and you still speak English like Chico Marx!”  And indeed, Mr. Sills does use a deft and brilliantly constructed faux-Italian accent that – depressingly – is the funniest thing about the show.  But accent humor has always been underrated, and Mr. Sills uses it as one of the many weapons in his arsenal to create a fully realized comic character.  He enervates the show as dedicatedly as he can, to no avail.

The news here, though, is not Mr. Sills but Ms. Fleming, the real-life acclaimed opera star, who makes her straight-play debut.  Mr. DiPietro evidently likes giving identical, uninteresting roles to aging divas (he did just that in 2013 with Marlo Thomas and Clever Little Lies at the George Street Playhouse), and this one is no exception.  La Diva (as she insists on being called, in one of the unsubtly emphasized parallels between Raquel and her husband), as a character, talks the talk in terms of high-minded comic snobbery but doesn’t walk the walk, so there’s not much as much here for Ms. Fleming to work with as there would be in, say, Madame Butterfly.  As for her performance, there’s nothing especially egregious to report, but nothing exciting, either.  She does the job, no more, no less.  Funnily enough, her greatest weakness as a straight performer is that she fails to project adequately, perhaps overcompensating for her change of scenery.

Anyway, Samson eventually comes back and starts writing the Diva’s memoir instead, while the Maestro picks up a female writer of his own (the aforementioned Anna Chlumsky, overdoing it), and the competition becomes fierce.  Two butlers (Blake Hammond and Scott Robertson) round out the ensemble, starting off serving purely to sing (hilariously) to fill the interludes between scenes but being let down in the end by (no surprise) Mr. DiPietro’s unapologetically obvious material.  Suffice it to say it turns out this isn’t so much a farce as a lecture.

Again and again Mr. DiPietro sets himself up to succeed in his writing and fails.  His work since the Tony-winning Memphis in 2009 (Nice Work if You Can Get It with Ms. Marshall, Clever Little Lies, and now Living on Love) has been irritatingly on-the-nose.  In these recent plays, there just isn’t enough time to pack in actual intelligence, so Mr. DiPietro has done with a semblance of it; enough of a gloss over the proceedings to make the audience feel smart but not so thick that they won’t leave feeling gutturally disappointed.  Living on Love, should you catch it in the right places, keeps the laughs coming, but they’re empty, they don’t touch on anything true, and they don’t lead anywhere.  Like an obscure aria to the uninitiated, to anyone outside the world of opera Living on Love will seem meaningless, irrelevant and ultimately hollow.