Two Outsize Personalities Collide in ‘Jack’

I guess it was inevitable after “I Hate Hamlet” that Nicol Williamson would do a one-man show. Who’d want to share a stage with him?

It’s been five years since his famous bad behavior caused a sensation during the run of the Paul Rudnick comedy on Broadway. Williamson was playing the ghost of John Barrymore, the great classical and comic actor from America’s most famous acting dynasty. In Rudnick’s play, Barrymore returns from the dead to coach a young TV actor, played by Evan Handler, nervous about his impending stage debut as Hamlet. Williamson took the coaching thing seriously, criticizing Handler’s performance out loud in mid-performance one night. Another night he delivered an unrehearsed blow in a sword fight with Handler, causing the younger actor to flee the theater in Act 1 and never return.

This time, Williamson plays Barrymore all by himself. In the entertaining “Jack: A Night on the Town With John Barrymore,” penned by Williamson and his director Leslie Megahey, the actor holds the stage at the Geffen Playhouse with relish and glee. He takes on a role apparently close to his own heart--like Williamson, John Barrymore performed a much-acclaimed Hamlet, and he went on to engage in very naughty and ruinous behavior, which in Barrymore’s case included drinking to oblivion and death at age 60.

With “Jack,” however, Williamson found a vehicle that took him back to the West End after a 15-year absence. The play was received there with reviews that ran the gamut from lukewarm to ecstatic (a London paper reported that some of the lukewarm notices caused Williamson to “walk out” on his second night). There is reason to see this play beyond the curiosity factor of watching one outsize theatrical personality playing another. “Jack” is a living show-biz bio with authentic wit and brio. But, ultimately, as a character study, the play is disappointingly short on insight. It will open on Broadway in April (Evan Handler: Get your tickets now).

Curiously, Williamson doesn’t have a terribly firm grip on the part, or at least on the words, which too often bobble and get away from him. This makes perfect sense in the play’s second half, which charts the alcoholic Barrymore’s decline in Hollywood. But how to explain it in the play’s first half, during the actor’s joyful rise as he conquers both the New York and the London stage?

Williamson never loses his cool though, and always lands on his feet, sounding as if he meant to miss that word all along. The first act is strained and staged a bit awkwardly to show the youthful Jack’s buoyancy. Williamson is downright bouncy, and literally runs around the theater, making entrances from every which way. He dons a flowing white shirt and black leotard, in which he looks goofy at best, to offer us what might have been Barrymore’s Hamlet. His Hamlet might approximate truthful Shakespearean acting circa 1925, but it looks stagy and rushed in this context.

On the plus side, sounding perfectly American, the supple-voiced Williamson delivers a younger Barrymore completely free of pretension, with a great sense of fun and high living. In certain moods and lights, this Scottish wonder with the sad, blue eyes and fleshy cheeks and jutting chin can actually resemble the dashing Barrymore with the profile that made women swoon. Williamson easily lobs off some of Barrymore’s great witticisms, his way with a story and his withering sarcasm. He also does delightful impressions of Winston Churchill (an ex-lover of Barrymore’s sister Ethel) and George Bernard Shaw.

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In the second act Williamson gives a heart-rending performance of Barrymore auditioning for the RKO film version of Hamlet. Long in the tooth for the part, Barrymore is also fighting a raging alcoholism that he would never get under control. He tries to do the scene twice, getting stuck on the same line. He flees the stage and delivers a desperate pep talk to himself, then goes racing back to the stage--and your heart races for him. But the demons have already gobbled him.

This scene is well crafted and taut, a playlet in itself. But the script overall does not offer us any way to look at Jack’s dissolution other than through his own prism of bitterness and regret. One would have hoped that both as director and co-writer Megahey could have helped Williamson to give us some insight other than the explanation that Barrymore was a personality too great for the pettiness of this world.

Finally, it must be said, Williamson does not capture Barrymore’s grandeur as it was captured on film. This was an actor who was already said to be in decline in his Hollywood years. If Barrymore’s mesmerizing performances in “Grand Hotel,” “Dinner at Eight” and especially in “Twentieth Century” constitute an actor in decline, then his prime must have been blinding. No one could hold his dignity against the line of impending doom the way that Barrymore could, and Williamson does not speak to that wonderful and very famous quality.

“Jack” is a worthwhile evening, not as a great play but as an opportunity to see two famous personalities merge in a hodgepodge of bravura acting and self-destruction. As Barrymore says, via Williamson: “Nothing runs downhill faster than a thoroughbred.” Williamson makes the ride a breezy and sometimes harrowing trip.

* “Jack: A Night on the Town With John Barrymore,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood, Wednesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 7. $25-$35. (310) 208-5454. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

A production of the Geffen Playhouse in association with John Heyman, Freddie Hancock and Meridian Theatrical Inc. Devised by Nicol Williamson and Leslie Megahey. Directed by Leslie Megahey. Sets Bethia Jane Green. Lights Richard Winkler. Sound effects John A. Leonard. Sound Christopher Bond. Production stage manager Thomas P. Carr.