‘WILD HONEY’--LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

“Wild Honey” opened on Broadway Thursday night to a set of wildly mixed reviews.

The New York Times’ Frank Rich, who had seen the London version, mostly didn’t like it.

“Retooled, with new and mostly inadequate performances, ‘Wild Honey’ isn’t the production it once was,” he wrote. “Ian McKellen’s bravura provides everything except, perhaps, the thing that matters most--sustained laughter. . . .

But the Daily News’ Howard Kissel was charmed. “Ian McKellen makes an irresistible shaggy dog, bounding into sedate rooms with the floppy, disheveled look that disconcerts everyone, frisking through the woods with an almost manic energy.”

Clive Barnes of the Post: “A triumph for all concerned--but particularly for (playwright Michael) Frayn, the absent Chekhov, and the highly present Ian McKellen. “From his first knee-bent entrance worthy of that Groucho Marxist hero, Captain Spalding, to its final careening run towards the curtain in the production’s show stopping coup de grace , McKellen makes the philandering schoolmaster a rare creature of farcical reality.”

Pia Lindstrom, WNBC-TV: “A melodrama that went berserk. What started off promisingly becomes outrageous in its second act. McKellen gives a manic performance . . . a caricature.”

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was snubbed by the London critics when it was a new play, but Miller is now regarded by the English as one of the language’s great playwrights.

In fact, his latest plays are having more luck over there than they did here. The UPI’s Gregory Jensen reports that his “The American Clock” (seen at the Taper in 1984) has been such a success at its small downstairs theater, the Cottesloe, that it’s moving upstairs to the Olivier Theatre.

Moreover, Miller’s “The Archbishop’s Ceiling”--poorly received at the Kennedy Center in 1977--is a hit at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s downstairs house, the Pit.

“Theatergoers here are raised on Shakespeare and Shaw, and Miller seems to them very much in the Shavian mold,” writes Jensen.

TITLE OF THE WEEK: “B-Movie, The Play,” to be presented by the Shaw Festival at Toronto Workshop Productions in January. (Tom Wood wrote it.)

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Esther Rolle in the Washington Post, on breaking into The Industry: “The first time I heard them talking spinoff, I thought it meant failure.”