‘Almost Perfect’ Imperfectly Reviewed in N.Y.

Can a nice little comedy about a married guy deciding to stick with his marriage succeed in New York?

That was the question when Jerry Mayer’s “Almost Perfect” opened at Off Broadway’s Hudson Guild Theatre in December after a long run at the Santa Monica Playhouse.

The answer seems to be no. “Almost Perfect” got a fine review from UPI’s Gloria Cole, but the rest of the notices ran from lukewarm to lukecold.

Cole was charmed by Mayer’s story in which, reversing the cliche, it’s the husband (Ethan Phillips) who is the unfulfilled romantic and the wife (Mia Dillon) who is the eternal pragmatist.

“Like a slightly more grown-up Holden Caulfield, Buddy tells us his story directly, winning our sympathy and understanding with his boyish charm and naive romanticism. As played by Phillips, he is short, slightly balding, slightly funny-looking and altogether impractical.”

The other critics also liked Phillips, but showed some impatience with Buddy.

William Raidy, Newark Star-Ledger: “Ethan Phillips makes the evening more than endurable. But one soon tires of the hero coming out once again to talk confidentially to the audience.”

Mel Gussow of the New York Times thought Buddy a “wimp,” his wife “petulant” and the rest of the characters “schematic. The play is like a situation comedy stretched to a two-hour pilot. Though Mr. Mayer has a certain facility, his territory has been co-opted by television.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post thought the play “reasonably amusing,” with a warmth and character of its own. But Barnes also suggested that it was a Neil Simon story, told “without Simon’s snap and crackle.”

Howard Kissell, New York Daily News, called it “a play you want to like more than it lets you.” The play fulfilled its allotted month on the theater’s season and closed after Christmas.

BECKETT BACKLASH. Some observers thought that Robin Williams and Steve Martin weren’t worthy to play in “Waiting for Godot” at Lincoln Center. Off Off Broadway playwright Robert Patrick recently argued just the opposite in the New York Times. He called Samuel Beckett “a pleasantly lugubrious collegiate skit writer” who shouldn’t “have been taken seriously in the first place.”

WORDS OF WISDOM. John Houseman in his last book “The Entertainers and the Entertained”: “More and more, our choices and our judgments and even our values and decisions in life are being conditioned and formed by numbers--to the point where these numbers have acquired an attraction and a power of their own, often almost independent of the subject to which they happen to relate.”