Filippo’s ‘Filumena’: Love, Italian-Style

Filumena used to be a prostitute. Then she was a mistress. Now she wants to be a wife.

“Her ace card is a deathbed scene that she fakes to get this wealthy man to marry her,” said David Galligan, whose staging of Eduardo de Filippo’s “Filumena” opened this weekend at the Court Theatre in West Hollywood. “The man has been philandering all over the world, and now that he thinks she’s dying--and their romance is already on the wane--he’s moved a young mistress into his house.”

The story, which is set in postwar Naples, “has operatic overtones; it’s really larger than life,” noted the director. “These people are joyously surviving, not bemoaning the fact of survival. They’re going about the task of living, rather than watching from the sidelines. So they talk loudly, they wave their arms around. They’re Italian .”

The 13-character drama, which stars Karen Kondazian and Mexican matinee idol Jorge Rivero, represents a significant departure in style for Galligan, whose credits include the musicals “Blame It on the Movies” I and II. “What appealed to me most about ‘Filumena’ is its romance,” he said. “I’ve always leaned towards the Cary Grant-Grace Kelly champagne-and-diamonds kind of romance, not what I can see on the street.”

The love scenes, Galligan assures, are purely PG-rated. “There are no four-letter words,” he added. “ ‘Whore’ is as bad as it gets.”

THEATER BUZZ: It was Zsa Zsa’s cop, Beverly Hills Police officer Paul Kramer, guarding the stage door last week at the Canon Theatre where Matthew Broderick (co-starring with Helen Hunt in the rotating cast of “Love Letters”) was the target of very ardent and persistent teen admirers. But the biggest fans turned out to be Broderick and Hunt. Upon learning of their security guard’s identity, they asked for his autograph. The off-duty officer, who had been hired for the week by the show’s producers, obliged. . . . The Hunt-Broderick duo set a new record for a week’s gross at the Canon.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: A.R. Gurney’s domestic comedy “The Cocktail Hour” is playing at the Doolittle Theatre. Jack O’Brien directs Nancy Marchand, Keene Curtis, Bruce Davison and Holland Taylor in a reprise of his original staging, which bowed at San Diego’s Old Globe in June ’88.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “This is a top-drawer drawing room comedy and social commentary that never quite makes the leap to Major Play. But this writer found a lot more to relish this time around--perhaps because the performances have become so expert.”

From the Hollywood Reporter’s Duane Byrge: “Gurney has delectably distilled the salient generational juices of this upper-crust WASP family and skillfully presented them through the focus of their traditional assemblage rite, a pre-dinner family cocktail hour.”

Thomas O’Connor of the Orange County Register was less impressed: “This hollow, intermittently amusing exercise in discreet, WASPy self-flagellation . . . serves largely to wave the formidable comic talents of Nancy Marchand, like the proud flag of a slowly sinking yacht.”

In Daily Variety, Kathleen O’Steen noted: “There’s not even the slightest hint of any of the starchy interaction that seemed to weigh the comedy down when it first premiered. . . . O’Brien has been with the play from its start, and its smoothness, accessibility and timing are impeccable.”