London Critics Not Charmed by ‘Frankie and Johnny’

London critics are often charmed by American plays, but Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” has provoked some fairly cutting remarks.

We had McNally’s play at the Mark Taper Forum last season. A cook and a waitress, neither young, shack up for the evening. She wants to leave it at that; he’s determined to stick around. Who will win?

Most American critics found it an easy play to like. Most of the West End critics felt just the opposite.

John Gross in the Sunday Telegraph: “A charmless piece of work, a carefully prefabricated romantic comedy about a pair of lost souls finding each other in the big city. We have been here before.”

Christopher Edwards in the Spectator: “Formulaic, sentimental and synthetic. You may feel you have seen it all before, and you have.”

Punch magazine’s Rhoda Koenig didn’t want to see the characters in the nude, Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard didn’t like the grunting-and-groaning in the dark, and the Observer’s Michael Ratcliffe was turned off by the play’s American view of life “as an ongoing childhood plus all the rude things grown-ups are allowed to say and do.”

Didn’t anybody like “Frankie and Johnny”--as opposed to admiring Julie Walters and Brian Cox’s performances? Yes. The Guardian’s Michael Billington, always a champion of things American, thought that his colleagues were being very snooty.

“I see nothing schmaltzy in the idea that sex can be a gateway to love and that a couple of sad-sacks can make a mid-life go of it,” said Billington. Good show.

I’LL BE YOUR WAITER: Interactive theater isn’t going away. The longest-running piece at the Theater der Welt festival in Hamburg had the audience sitting at long tables while the performer, Jean-Marie Finn, served them lentil soup and talked about his life in a mental institution. Theatre Week’s man-on-the-scene, Henry Popkin, found the talk “persuasive” and the soup “acceptable.”

STRATFORD REDUX: Founded with great fanfare in 1955, the Stratford, Conn., Shakespeare Festival was going to be the U.S. answer to the annual summer revels at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Alas, the playhouse on the Housatonic was more admired for its box lunches than its productions, and finally went broke in 1982.

But the physical plant still exists, and this summer it’s offering a mini-festival of plays by San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater--”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and Shaw’s “St. Joan” starring Andrea Marcovicci. If these go well, a more ambitious program will be tried next year.

Maybe Stratford could become the Mark Taper Forum’s sister theater. Gordon Davidson used to be a stage manager there.

CURTAIN LINE OF THE WEEK: Laurence Olivier’s last public statement, on whether an office building should go up on the site of the Elizabethan Rose Theatre: “Can a muse of fire exist under a ceiling of commerce?”