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Theater Review Comedy and coincidence, courtesy of Shaw

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

YOU NEVER CAN TELL, by George Bernard Shaw. Featuring Robert Sean Leonard, Charles Keating, Simon Jones and Helen Carey. Directed by Nicholas Martin. At the Roundabout Theatre Company, Laura Pels Theatre, 1530 Broadway at 45th St. Through Sunday, Sept. 13.

Early in his long career, George Bernard Shaw gave certain of his works the label “plays pleasant and unpleasant.” “You Never can Tell,” written exactly 100 years ago and now being given a sparkling revival at the Roundabout Theatre company’s Laura Pels Theatre, is emphatically in its author’s “pleasant” category.

“You Never Can Tell” was first staged in London in 1899, when Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” had only recently scored a vast success, a circumstance which caused some of the newspaper critics to lump the two works together, often referring to them as “farces,” a term that annoyed Shaw, who preferred that his play be thought of as a comedy, farce being, in his view, a theatrical animal bearing a distinctly lesser pedigree.

By the time he wrote “You Never Can Tell,” Shaw was in his early 40s, and hadn’t made much of a mark in the theater, despite having written four plays, including “Widower’s House,” “Candida,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” and “Arms and the Man,” all of which have become, by now, pillars of the Shavian canon.

“You Never Can Tell,” particularly in Nicholas Martin’s Roundabout production, jauntily played out on Allen Moyer’s sun-drenched seaside summer hotel patio, is feather-light, as though specifically designed as escapist fare for the calendar’s warmest months.

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Truth to tell, although the current “You Never Can Tell” plays almost as though its author had assigned himself the task of writing the English equivalent of a French “boulevard” piece, the full text does possess a mildly serious undertone, rooting at least two of its characters in the Fabian socialism to which Shaw was more or less permanently addicted.

In this mildly deracinated cutting of the text, the play is less about a “liberated” English pre-feminist, after raising her three fatherless children in Madeira, coming to terms with her status as a self-declared “new woman,” than it is about the romantic entanglement of her eldest daughter with a young, idealistic “five shilling dentist” pursuing an unprofitable practice in a furnished lodging house.

Fortunately, the luckless medical man, Valentine, is adroitly played by Robert Sean Leonard as a gawky tower of amiable awkwardness, in the sort of richly comedic physical performance that stops just this side of Bill Irwin, whose version of “Scapin’ ” was seen on the same stage last season.

Valentine impetuously accepts an invitation to lunch with the family of a perky patient who has stumbled into his offices for an emergency extraction. The dentist, behind in his rent, brings along his landlord as a form of peacemaking.

No one should be unnecessarily shocked to learn that Valentine’s guest, Mr. Crampton, turns out to be the long-lost husband of the patient’s feminist mother, Mrs. Clandon, who changed her name slightly in the interests of starting a new life on the Portuguese island to which she had fled with her children some two decades earlier.

The landlord, then, is revealed as the biological father of roughly a quarter of the cast, which indicated that Shaw had no fear of wading into the waters of coincidence.

The Roundabout production is aided no end by the casting of the deftly ironic Simon Jones as Crampton and of Helen Carey, who made a standout Roundabout debut last season in “London Assurance,” as his adventurous once and former spouse.

The role that often runs away with productions of “You Never Can Tell,” once the action is moved from the dentist’s quarters to the cheery outdoor dining deck of the Marine Hotel in Torbay, the Devon town where Shaw set his story, is that of the waiter who more or less runs the lunch that eventually becomes a family reunion. The waiter, a one-man bastion of common sense, a role which may have been a kind of sketch for the dustman, Alfred Dolittle, whom Shaw created for “Pygmalion” later in his career, is played this time by Charles Keating, following in the footsteps of such actors as Philip Bosco, who played the part in 1986, and Leo G. Carroll, who did it in 1948.

Keating, while perhaps not quite as memorable in the role as Bosco was a dozen years ago, nevertheless recognizes the richness of the waiter’s lines, and makes the most of them, while Katie Finneran, as Mrs. Clandon’s eldest daughter, Gloria, sometimes called Sophronia (don’t ask), is the very model of a self-possessed and poised young woman of the turning century.

Excellent support if provided by the Roundabout cast, particularly by Nicholas Kepros as lawyer and loyal friend of the family, although his role is somewhat compromised by the deletion of the Fabian connection which links him to Mrs. Clandon.

Catherine Kellner has frenetic fun as Dolly, the family’s youngest adolescent, as does Saxon Palmer in the role of Philip, Mrs. Clandon’s only son. As Bohun, a young lawyer at the center of yet another credibility-stretching Shavian coincidence, Jere Shea brings a little explosion of energy to the play’s final scene.

“You Never Can Tell” is far from the finest play George Bernard Shaw ever wrote, but since even his most negligible works are livelier and vastly more playable than the best of a lot of other playwrights, the Roundabout revival is a very welcome addition to the city summer.

Special mention should be made of Michael Krass’s perfectly realized costumes, just the thing for a day at the beach as the 19th Century took its final bows and disappeared.

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