Maybe you have to be a Marx fanatic to understand. Perhaps if my side had been splitting, I wouldn't have noticed that it took three hours for the actors of "Groucho: A Life in Revue" to tell, in words and music, the simple and occasionally touching story of five Jewish brothers who grew up to be famous comedians.
Julius, Leonard, Arthur, Milton, and Herbert Marx grew up in a poor Jewish area of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Their mother originally got them into acting as a way of making money for the family, and their zany vaudeville act surprised everyone by attracting attention all over the country.
Taking on the respective names Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo, and Zeppo, the brothers began to perform full-time. They made several movies together, including "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers." Groucho later went on to host a quiz show called "You Bet Your Life," which featured the same quick wit and insults that the brothers had used to make their name.
The Emerson show, which played this past weekend at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, pulled off the classic slapstick humor and quick quips that made the Marx brothers a hallmark of American entertainment in the twentieth century.
The costumes were impeccable. Ferrante, who both directed the play and played Groucho himself, transformed his features before our eyes from ordinary Semitic (er, Italian) to the thick eyebrows and mustache that freed him and his brothers to be goofy.
The dazzling beauty of Amanda Rogers (who played every female role) served as his prompt, her every line launching him into a clever jab at her or, alternately, attempt to get her into bed.
Between these acts, Ferrante reminisced for the audience about Groucho's early days, the struggles he and his brothers endured to succeed in the entertainment industry.
The play was tasteful in its balance of humor and fact; while relating true stories from the Marxes' impoverished New York childhood, it was never solicitous. The characters reacted to their plights with the best of humors, which is where the slapstick came in handy.
Towards the middle of the first act, however, this balance wasn't enough to capture the audience. The cast knew it. Ferrante, soon joined by Richard Tatum (who played Harpo), began to direct quips at audience members.
If a few seasoned Marx fans laughed prematurely at a routine they could see in the making, the actors interrupted themselves and chastised those members for not having more patience. This was cute the first time, but not the second or third.
It was also not cute when they would let their own improvisational talent distract them beyond graceful reentry into the original script. Most irritating, and pathetic, was when they lost so much inhibition that they began chastising the audience for not laughing enough.
"Come on!" Ferrante called more than a few times. "The Red Sox won last night...you should be in a better mood than this."
Hey, man, a winning baseball team will only carry us so far in a boring musical. One woman, seated a few rows ahead of me, snored openly during the second act.
The "life in revue" pun, though clever, was puzzling in the context of a play without much actual music. It was also rather strange to see the Marx brothers singing sentimental songs to each other; the juxtaposition was just too uncanny to be touching.
Toward the end of his life, when his brother dies, Groucho begins to show emotion and fragility in every facet of his personality, and the entire mood of the play became somber and much more believable.
Could this have been carried throughout the play by a more balanced character development or actors who weren't so self-conscious? Perhaps. I am of the persuasion, however, that over-ambition foiled this attempt to be reminiscent but humorous; true to life but not tragic; slapstick but sentimental.
Ferrante frequently fell over the old-fashioned davenport at the front of the stage and batted his eyelashes at the audience, turning over and fluttering his feet as if he were in an old-fashioned film. A single drum beat at each of these intervals emphasized the reversion into old-fashioned humor, and the audience appreciated it.
Those movements are, for anyone who's seen the Marx Brothers before, inextricably associated with memories of spotty, skipping film slides and silent movies. To see him bat his eyelashes in person and realize how powerful that association proved, in itself, to be a blast from the past.
Eh, or at least a soft wind. Ba-dum bum PSH.
