STAGE REVIEW : Carole Shelley Shines in Pallid ‘Broadway Bound’ Production

It’s not without good reason that Carole Shelley’s name appears above the title in the program for “Broadway Bound.” This is not just an agent’s deal. Shelley earns the distinction.

Her turn as Kate in this concluding play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy (which includes “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Biloxi Blues”) is very classy. The play is also the best in the trilogy, but you would never guess it from the pallid production that opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson.

Well, you would if you listened carefully--another thing that is not easy to do in the Ahmanson where words still get swallowed up by the ceiling and walls. But any time a writer can take such a loving look back at the pain in his own family and create a comedy filled with one-liners solidly based on character rather than mere invention, you know the play has more than bankability. It has stature.

That opinion hasn’t changed. “Broadway Bound” is exceptionally adroit, even more so than “Brighton Beach” and “Biloxi,” both of which are not exactly chopped liver. Several characters from “Brighton” re-emerge here, only slightly older: Our quotable storyteller, Eugene, the playwright’s alter-ego (William Ragsdale); his older brother Stanley (Nathan Lane); his now-well-off Aunt Blanche (Bernice Massi); his weary father Jack (David Margulies) and dour mother Kate (Shelley). They’re still living in the same, virtually unchanged two-story Brighton Beach house, carefully re-created in a cutaway set by the same designers: David Mitchell, set; Tharon Musser, lighting.

Only now it’s deep winter--a winter filled with discontent. Blanche has moved out; Kate’s dad has moved in; the boys are getting ready to try Manhattan and . . . Well, we don’t want to give it all away. But this is a family in transition with all the trauma transition implies. And still a comedy ?

Yes. A bittersweet comedy that, in the interpretation offered by this national company at the Ahmanson, is sometimes sharply bitter and entirely too low-key.

Gene Saks is the director, as he was on Broadway (where this production is not bound), but when was the last time he looked in? The impression--if not the answer--is not recently. The show needs a vigorous cranking, a shot of super-unleaded or Geritol--whatever will rev up those engines. It’s only just putt-putting when it should be waltzing.

Or at least fox-trotting. The play’s crowning--and most calculated--scene is still the much touted and written-about tender fox-trot between Eugene and his melancholy mom. It survives this production inviolate, remaining as rewarding with Ragsdale and Shelley as it was with Linda Lavin and Jonathan Silverman in the Broadway outing, though it is transparently a playwright’s moment.

Ragsdale acquits himself with a believable and candid innocence most of the time, but he is often routed by the pace of the play which is, well, off. “Broadway Bound” was never short, but at three hours this one feels endless.

With the exception of Lane who turns in by far the most hyper, twitching and funny Stanley one remembers in either “Broadway Bound” or “Brighton Beach,” the curious dichotomy between performance and perception applies to some of the other characters. Take Salem Ludwig’s Ben, a wise and unsentimental portrait of Kate’s grumpy, unreformed Trotskyite father. It’s a portrait understated to the point of self-cancellation.

Massi’s Blanche has a certain vitality as she tries to persuade the recalcitrant Ben to move to Florida with his wife, but it’s isolated--existing in a surrounding sea of low energy. She received a round of applause Wednesday, as much because her moment was up-tempo as because she painted an identifiable dilemma as a fond yet anguished daughter.

Lowest on the energy scale is Margulies as the troubled father, Jack. Shelley, whose own portrait of Kate is darker and angrier than Lavin’s was, is in a way more credible and always interesting. (It is astonishing how well this British classical actress has captured the Booklynese vocabulary, verbally and physically. Watch her step out of the house into the icy street, gingerly picking her way and clinging to the walls in order not to slip.) Margulies’ quiet desperation, however, washes out as fatigue, which is far less desirable.

In the final analysis, the play’s doldrums and failure to adequately project itself could be due to another, older problem, that gnawing one of the cavernous theater itself. Either way, Saks could do a lot--or a lot more--to remedy the situation. The company deserves it. Los Angeles deserves it.

Performances at the Music Center run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with matinees Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., until July 3. Tickets: $11-$35; (213) 410-1062.