TV REVIEW : Simon’s ‘Broadway’ a Small-Screen Triumph

You expect to see a Neil Simon play produced for the big screen, not for TV. But in a major shift of direction, Simon for the first time has taken one of his plays, the 1986 “Broadway Bound,” and adapted it as a movie for television.

Any risk of reduction or compromise has been triumphantly surmounted in “Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound,” on ABC at 9 tonight (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

The third and strongest play of Simon’s semi-autobiographical trilogy (following “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Biloxi Blues”), TV’s “Broadway Bound” is not only loyal to its theatrical origins but also acutely felt on the small screen as the intimate, emotional family drama it is.

Of course, it’s a comedy--sort of--but not the kind that early Simon fans are used to. Here the so-called one-liners don’t come out of the air but spring naturally from character. It’s a deeper, even painful Simon who is portraying the foibles and stresses of his family at a time when he and his brother were still living at home and beginning their careers as comedy writers.

The adaptation by Simon, who judiciously trimmed the play to 90 minutes to fit, with commercials, in the two-hour TV-movie block, happily retains the off-screen narration of the Eugene Jerome character (Simon’s alter ego).

It’s 1948, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and the opening words heard over the image of the family’s snowbound front porch set the mood: “The winters were bitter cold . . . two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean in a house that never had enough heat. But when you’re 22, you’ve got your dreams to keep you warm.”

It’s those dreams to be comedy writers that are realized by the two brothers (a touching Corey Parker as the younger, innocent Eugene, and a brash Jonathan Silverman as the older, ebullient Stan, i.e, Danny Simon). In one of the play’s most funny/hurtful scenes, the boys gather around the radio with their Jewish mom (Anne Bancroft), their garment-cutter dad (Jerry Orbach) and their Trotskyite grandfather (Hume Cronyn) to hear their first comedy sketch played over the air.

Even then, Simon used his eccentric family for material, and the result leaves scars that careen the play toward its bountiful and melancholy end.

But as much as this is Simon’s personal odyssey, framed through the perspective of memory, it’s the mother’s character--a woman who thrives on cooking pot roast and polishing the family table--that dominates the story.

Under Paul Bogart’s lucid direction, Bancroft’s performance is indelible and memorable as a woman losing her husband’s love. And in the great scene--the mother’s dreamy, graceful dance with her son following her youthful reminiscence of dancing with George Raft in the Primrose Ballroom--the play achieves its sublime and bittersweet moment.