New York Finds ‘Rumors’ Juicy as Yesterday’s News

Neil Simon’s “Rumors” opened Thursday at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre and gave New York Post drama critic Clive Barnes “something to cheer about.”

But he was a cheerleading squad of one.

For most of New York’s critics, “Rumors,” which had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in September, was something more to shrug about. Sure, they all laughed, but their collective attitude was summed up by the headline on the Newsday review: “Fun, but . . . “

The show was neither meaningful enough for Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News nor funny enough for Frank Rich of the New York Times or Linda Winer of Newsday. At times, it seemed their message could be summed up by the alien visitor in “Stardust Memories” who tells Woody Allen to “tell funnier jokes.”

“Maybe I’ve led a charmed life, but I can’t recall hearing this many toilet jokes since the ninth grade,” Rich complained. “Act I of ‘Rumors’ is sometimes as funny as it wants to be. (But) ‘Rumors’ will be most satisfying to those who wish to partake of an after-theater dinner at 9 o’clock.”

Winer said she missed Simon’s old “wisecracking hits.”

“Instead of his snappy dialogue, he has reverted to a genre of old-hat humor not encountered . . . outside the world of dinner theaters,” she said.

In the spirit of cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who leveled the suspicion that nice guy George Bush has an evil twin, Skippy, Kissel speculated that the Simon whose last effort was an acclaimed autobiographical trilogy has a twin “who turns out comedies with no soul, where every other line is intended to get a laugh, as if to meet some abstract quota. This is the one who wrote ‘Rumors.’ ”

Simon addressed some of the structural problems that critics attacked in the Old Globe run of “Rumors.”

The plot of the farce remains the same: Four couples panic when they show up at a 10th anniversary dinner party to find the hostess missing and the host shot in the ear. But now the reason they’re afraid to tell the police what happened is that their host is the deputy mayor of New York, whose political career they fear they will jeopardize.

The reasoning didn’t cut it with any of the critics. Nonetheless, Barnes had a good time. He called it “an unlikely situation with certain preposterous propositions” that Simon “milks . . . full cream ahead as if cholesterol had no tomorrow.”