The House of Blue Leaves, Walter Kerr theatre, New York, review

The House of Blue Leaves, Walter Kerr theatre, New York, review

Ben Stiller as father Artie is compelling as a grown-up version of the likable losers he specialises in playing on the big screen. Rating: * * *

Tender: Ben Stiller and Edie Falco in 'The House of Blue Leaves' Photo: Joan Marcus

By Claire Prentice 12:44PM BST 26 Apr 2011

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In a Queens apartment block, everyone is praying for a miracle. It is October 1965, the Pope is in town, Vietnam rumbles on and, the American Dream having failed to materialise, everyone is looking for their own way out.

More than four decades before American Idol, the working class nobodies in John Guare’s 1966 black comedy see celebrity as an escape route from humdrum lives. Appropriately, the bill for this Broadway revival is packed with Hollywood A-listers.

Ben Stiller is Artie, the zookeeper who dreams of making it big as a songwriter in Hollywood. His mentally-ill wife, Bananas (Edie Falco), is confined to the house after a failed suicide attempt. Earmarked for Vietnam, son Ronnie has run away from the army and is plotting to blow up the Pope in his own bid for notoriety.

Throw in a bunch of celebrity-obsessed nuns, a beautiful, deaf starlet and a local boy turned movie hot-shot and you have the ingredients for a wisecracking if scattershot satire.

Scott Pask has transformed the Walter Kerr Theatre into a cluttered New York apartment, at once cosy and claustrophobic.

Stiller made his Broadway debut playing Ronnie 25 years ago. Returning as father Artie, he is compelling as a grown-up version of the likable losers he specialises in playing on the big screen, though Artie’s middle-age gives a pathos to his failed dreams. Jennifer Jason Leigh is delightfully ditzy as Artie’s lover, Bunny, and delivers many of the play’s funniest lines.

The stand-out performance comes from Falco, best known for her TV roles in Nurse Jackie and The Sopranos. As Bananas, the dead-eyed, doped-up housewife, she dreams not of fame or fortune but of being given a last- minute reprieve from the mental hospital, and emerges as the only character with moral depth amid a parade of narcissists.

There are touching moments of tenderness in the scenes between her and Stiller, and a heartbreaking exchange when Artie describes the beautiful blue leaf-shaded asylum to which he plans to have his wife committed.

But the tone shifts awkwardly between tragedy, black comedy and farce in David Cromer’s uneven production. Like the piano bar protagonist, some of Guare’s humour seems dated and the laughs ultimately undermine the emotional power of a cast of losers at sea in a shallow, materialistic society.

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