Critical Success

Pity the critic who has to review Terrence McNally’s “It’s Only a Play.” The whole play hinges on one all-important review, the one that can make the play a hit or potentially ruin the careers of all involved. Talk about making someone self-conscious about her job. Jeez.

Fortunately, the stakes aren’t nearly so high for the cast--or the reviewer--of this production at Theatre East in Studio City. The last show of Theatre East’s first subscription season, it has already survived opening night, and has even extended for three weeks.

“It’s Only a Play” takes place in the late-night hours following the opening of “The Golden Egg,” a much-anticipated Broadway play. While a party rages on downstairs, several key players congregate in the producer’s bedroom to await the reviews, and thus the fate of the show.

Not everyone wants the play to be a huge hit. Actor James Wicker (Jeff Blumberg) turned down the lead role written for him. As his TV career teeters on the edge of cancellation, he wants his decision to be justified. The director Frank Finger (Robert Factor) is an enfant terrible with a string of critical successes; he wants desperately to fail. And then there is the critic, the vicious Ira Drew (Christopher Weeks), who, it turns out, is a frustrated playwright himself.

Eric Stoner’s set works, designwise. The furnishings, however, are not so much upscale Manhattan townhouse as they are sale merchandise at Robinsons-May.

Directed by Stu Berg, “It’s Only a Play” is entertaining enough, and there’s little he or the actors can do to smooth out McNally’s double-back ending. He could, though, do more with the characters, some of whom need more shape. The relationship between the TV actor Wicker and the playwright Peter is particularly murky. Their cattiness toward each other suggests a history that has been erased.

Ditzy producer Julia Budder (Kathleen Taylor) keeps missing her cliches: “There’s no business . . . like the one we’re in.” Taylor’s jokes, however, peter out and don’t deliver the laughs they could. Likewise, cab driver Emma Bovary (Ora B. Nance) should put these pathetic and vain characters in their place, but several of her best lines are lost in mumbled enunciation. As the waiter, alternate David Woodle seemed rather underprepared, generally a rough cog in the wheel.

But the wheel spins well enough. If not hilarious, “It’s Only a Play” is clever and enjoyable. It is, in the words of the critics who review “The Golden Egg”: “Good, solid theater.”

BE THERE

“It’s Only a Play,” Theatre East, 12655 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. End June 29. (818) 760-4160.