I suspect it will be very hard for anyone not to have a good time at the terrific revival of The Front Page now at the Broadhurst Theater. And that’s the opinion of someone who has seen the material perhaps too many times in one version or another. Maybe in 1928 when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote their frenetic farce about a bunch of scurrilous, cutthroat newspaper men, audiences and critics alike were eager to respond to the play’s steady stream of improbable, implausible action and its calculatingly rough language.
In today’s world, half the dialogue would be considered either offensive, off-limits, or politically incorrect. However, today, audiences (and I include myself) are also more apt to simply marvel at the sheer mechanics of a play that can juggle almost two dozen characters in a circus of melodramatic skirmishes without shortchanging their purpose, identity, or personality.
And when you consider that director Jack O’Brien has also brought together some of the best characters actors in the business, you can just sit back in awe while you laugh your head off for two and one-half rip-roaring hours. I’ve seen two film versions (one, a distaff variation, “His Girl Friday,” with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant ) and a number of stage revivals including a splendid musical adaptation, Windy City, that played the Paper Mill Playhouse in 1984. As intended, they were all grating, over-emphatic, and absolutely sensational in their own way.
So what is it that continues to make The Front Page a wonderful show? I don’t really know except to start with what we’ve got right now. O’Brien has found the perfect balance between outright lunacy and lampooned life, as he permits the play to speed along on its brakeless, often reckless course to who-cares-where. We are suddenly in an unscrupulous journalistic world that comes alive with paradoxical insidiousness.
True, the slam-bang comings and goings in the seedy newsroom within a Chicago criminal court building more often suggests the antics in a Feydeau farce than the scenario for a quasi-realistic peek into the fourth estate. But in each sharply drawn character there is a natural pulse that never betrays the comedy nor compromises the darker reality of the play.
One amazing achievement is that John Slattery, as big shot reporter Hildy Johnson, gives us a cynical mercenary character with whom to empathize. No cheap laughs with Slattery as he plies his matured arrogance and expertise against a roomful of disarmingly self-serving vultures. As Johnson’s on-again, off-again boss Walter Burns, Nathan Lane virtually dominates the second and third acts (yes three and you need them to slow down your increasing pulse rate) with a towering, comical portrayal of a hungry managing editor whose insincerity is second to his almost barbarous ethics.
In spite of the play’s impenetrable convolutions, nothing could be less important than the plot which toys with the traumas of an escaped murdered, a hooker with a heart of gold, a pair of crooked politicians (What?????), a distressed fiancee and her mother and a policeman who theorizes naively on criminal psychology.
The memorable scene between the mayor (Dann Florek) and the sheriff (John Goodman) which shifts the balance of powers of officialdom from one to the other is a classic depiction of moronic incompetency. And when the mayor tries to buy the loyalty of a feather-brained messenger (as punctuated with hilarious spurts of vacuous responsiveness by the sublime Robert Morse) with a job offer of dubious distinction, you can hardly hear the dialogue over the laughter.
Halley Feiffer and Holland Taylor are splendid respectively as the nonplused fiancee and her mother who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the chaos. Standout among the otherwise hard-as-nails reporters is Jefferson Mays, who, as the effete, hypochondriacal columnist garners plenty of howls spraying his phone with antiseptic and stoically bearing the brunt of his colleagues derisions. We happily bear the brunt of a comedy that takes no prisoners...and makes no excuses for laughing at a world that was once clearly black and white and (fill in the blank) all over.
