Neil Simon's new pastiche of his one-act, hotel-based plays of old, now newly dressed up and called Hotel Suite, is truly the first theatrical experience that I can recall that is both remarkable and stunningly awful. The four tales represented are all by Mr. Simon and have varying degrees of success as plays. However, two of these reach the kind of emotional heights that leave you with a glazed smile on your face and a tear in your eye, and the other two are the kind of eye-rolling, bewilderingly lame efforts you'd expect to see played in the final 10 minutes of "Saturday Night Live" on a bad evening. Cast with four actors, who play the same couples in two segments apiece, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that one set of performers far outclasses the other. The surprise is that the comic set pieces falter miserably, and the drama soars, not at all what you'd expect from anything by Neil Simon.
First, let's cover the good. Playing Diana and Sidney, Helen Carey and Leigh Lawson bring sly wit and heartfelt nuance to the first and third pieces, culled from California Suite and London Suite, respectively. In the first, they play a married couple from Britain, in town for the Academy Awards, where Diana is nominated for acting. Sidney is her unfazed antiques-dealer beau. Covering the before and after of the ceremony, the duo snip and bicker about various subjects, the most urgent being his affection for younger men and her tolerance of it because she loves him too much to let him go. Carey and Lawson are so accomplished, they make you believe they've never seen the film version of this, with Maggie Smith and Michael Caine positively sublime in the segment (appropriately enough, Smith won an Oscar for the role. And author Simon even slips a little reference to Caine in one of Diana's tirades.) This section is breezy and engaging, but the two actors are even more luminous in their second one-act together, titled "Diana and Sidney."
This piece reunites the two after a separation years back. Diana is now a highly successful TV star with loads of dough, and Sidney lives in Greece with a male companion who, he says, will die very soon and seeks Diana's help. Now, Simon's writing tends to be a bit dated, but not here. Carey and Lawson make us feel the sting of a failed romance yet expertly lace the proceedings with moments of lovely humor and warmth. When these two are on stage together, you are enveloped in sheer excellence, and happy you spent the time.
Which brings me to the bad. It was a vicious mistake to put, as the second and final pieces of the show, playlets centering on an annoying couple named Marvin and Millie (Ron Orbach and Randy Graff), who are as shrill and toxic as Diana and Sidney are affectionate and indelible. Visitor From Philadelphia is an obvious, painfully overacted tale of a husband who wakes up to an unconscious prostitute in his California suite and must try to hide her from his yammering wife, due at any second. Filled with the kind of stupid mistaken-identity/hiding-the- body shtick that went out with the cancellation of "Three's Company," it doesn't hold up, and Orbach and Graff are so grating, you beg for the hotel manager to give them a pink slip and ask Diana and Sidney to stay indefinitely. If only that was the end of it. The second vignette, even more pointless and numbing, puts Millie and Marvin in a lusher suite, on the day of their daughter's wedding day. Seems the little bride has locked herself in the bathroom, and old big, blustery Dad can get her out. More laughless, slapstick nonsense here, and Orbach and Graff seem even more over-the-top, making this one more painful. (Admittedly, the crowd I saw Hotel Suite with ate it all up, which led me to believe they don't own television sets, where you can see this kind of low-rent junk on reruns of "Full House" and at least that one has a dog.)
Hotel Suite leaves one feeling befuddled and schizophrenic; like Faye Dunaway in "Chinatown": "I loved it!" (Smack!) "I hated it!" John Tillinger, the director, seemingly chose the sensitive, finely tuned route with Sidney and Diana, and fell asleep when Marvin and Millie had to rehearse, letting them run amok and make a lot of noise, to no effect whatsoever. Check out, please!
