Dismissing "The Odd Couple," Manoa Valley Theatre's limited engagement that opened Thursday evening with television personalities Joe Moore and Pat Sajak starring, would seem to be the easiest thing in the world. After all, we've seen this sort of thing before. They feel a need for a stretch, these celebrities with all the success and cash that ought to keep them satisfied, and the results are invariably unhappy. Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Cabaret" comes to mind, Marilu Henner in "Chicago" -- Linda Blair in "Grease," for heaven's sake. Once the stars' followers have fled the stalls, ticket sales dry up so fast they make your (and Linda Blair's) head spin. Moore and Sajak not such
an odd coupling after allReview by Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comAnd so it is with grudging respect, with a critic's sigh at all the choice insults that will go to waste, that I fervently, ardently and wholeheartedly recommend you see "The Odd Couple" before it closes tomorrow afternoon. It's a first-class production all around and one that could well have become a hot ticket even if its stars had never anchored a newscast or spun a money wheel.
Not that your past associations with Moore and Sajak won't tamper with your appreciation of Simon's play. It will be a while before I'm able to hear Moore's nightly updates on America's New War without thinking of the slovenly, boxer shorts-clad tyrant whom he plays to perfection here. Looking for all the world like Hawaii's favorite news anchor got caught in a rainstorm on the way to Channel 2, his Oscar Madison has a ferocious stage presence -- when Moore knocks a pickle out of someone's hand, it sails into the audience like a missile. It's the same seriousness, albeit on a lighter plane, that Moore brings to his newscasts, and he's as compelling onstage for the same reason he's compelling on TV. (By the way, the ongoing debate over whether Moore's stage career constitutes a breach of journalistic ethics is a nonissue. If anything, his stage work offers audiences an unintentional seminar on the ties between journalism and performance, two fields that are more closely allied than the public realizes.)
If you've watched television at any time during the past 25 years, you know the plot of "The Odd Couple." Oscar, whose wife and children have flown the nest before the play begins, is living a life of apocalyptic dishevelment in his New York apartment. Ties hang from picture frames, the fridge is filled with rotten food, and the rest of the landscape is a teeming sea of beer cans and open potato chip bags. (Karen Archibald's set manages to nicely describe the clutter without putting the cast in imminent danger. No small feat, given Oscar's filth.)
Very soon we learn that Felix has been similarly dismissed by his wife and children, and now contemplates his options (e.g., suicide) with a melodramatic self-pity that will make him the bane of Oscar's existence, once the latter has proposed that they room together as a way of sharing expenses.
What: "The Odd Couple" When: 7:30 p.m. today and 4 p.m. tomorrow
Where: Hawaii Theatre, 1130 Bethel St.
Cost: $17 to $37
Call: 528-0506
Pat Sajak as Felix arrives without any of the baggage Moore's day job brings, and I must confess I came with no expectations, which is odd when you think about it. I mean, I've flipped past the guy's syndicated TV program almost every day for the past 20 years; by now you'd think I'd found time to muse about his possible acting chops. But no dice. Sajak's so completely married to the Merv Griffin monolith "Wheel of Fortune" that he, like sidekick Vanna White, is as inscrutable as those blank letters on the wall. Small wonder that comics assume that he and Vanna are mere ghosts in the machine.
And so I cheered for Sajak rather more loudly than I thought I would, his Felix a hilarious maelstrom of neuroses both mild (hypochondria) and severe (obsessive compulsive disorder, in the days before the term was invented). The actor whines, rages, snorts, even limps like a wounded horse when necessary, and the audience eats the performance up.
As good as each is singly, Moore and Sajak are even better in the play's duet scenes, as they prepare to double-date with the Pigeon sisters (Stephanie Conching and Zenia Zambrano), or especially during the deliriously funny pantomime that opens Act 3, Oscar stepping all over Felix's fluffed pillows and spraying his linguini with air freshener. The long career of Moore and Sajak's friendship must have come in handy here, not to mention the memories of their joint days with the American Forces Vietnam Network in Saigon, where the pair were, yes, roommates.
Their real-life affection, incidentally, helps smooth over one of "The Odd Couple's" most improbable elements: Why would such completely different men ever become friends in the first place? The answer, at least in this production, is that each secretly envies the qualities he claims to despise in the other.
The ensemble, a Greek chorus of poker players, is credible and competent, though no more. (The play gives them little to work with.) And Jim Hutchison's direction, though on the whole exceptional, tends to go slack in spots; when Oscar exits to prepare drinks in Act 2, an hour seems to elapse before he returns.
But these are quibbles. The ovation after Thursday's performance was long and loud, a ringing endorsement not just of escapist entertainment, but of a New York that now seems very far away, when the biggest problem one faced was post-divorce adjustment. (When Oscar says, "Felix, getting a clear picture on Channel 2 isn't my idea of whoopee," the laughs come many-layered indeed.)
And television, which of late has seen fit to offer us only images of collapse and horror, also earns kudos, again offered grudgingly, for furloughing Moore and Sajak. It's thanks to the imperial medium's generosity that such valentines to troubled times are possible.
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