Faking It Onstage

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Let's start with the fake orgasm. The scene everyone remembers from Rob Reiner's iconic 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally is the one in which Meg Ryan's mischievous Sally shows Billy Crystal's bemused Harry just how women fake it — in a restaurant (actually Katz's Deli in New York City, where the relevant table now bears a plaque boasting of its close encounter with the ecstatic Ryan).

So a major point of interest in the movie's starry stage adaptation, which opened last week in London's West End, is: How does Alyson Hannigan's Sally measure up? Answer: She gives it everything she's got. No stranger to sex jokes after her work in the smutty American Pie films, Hannigan starts quietly, reclining in her seat and moaning softly; then she moves into second gear with a brace of breathless "Oh Gods" and "Yeah, right theres"; climaxing with a series of table slaps and shrieks. Alas, this is about the only point in the show that matches the verve and vivacity of the original.

You can see how it must have looked on paper. Take a dialogue-heavy, witty film (written by the urbane Nora Ephron) and cast aging teen heartthrob Luke Perry across from in-vogue Hannigan in a stage version. Financially, the combination is almost sure to succeed — Perry still has a cult following from his stint in the '90s TV soap Beverly Hills 90210, and Hannigan has guaranteed youth market appeal after American Pie and her lead role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But the play crucially falls down in the production. Too much of London's theater in recent years feels like it's derived from television and the movies. Sometimes that can be done creatively, as with Terry Johnson's Hitchcock Blonde. Sometimes, though, the need to shoehorn TV and film celebrities into a production, as with Matthew Perry and Minnie Driver in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, is simply awful. The best screen-to-stage adaptations — like Disney's The Lion King, which uses puppetry to inspired effect — are reinvented and freed by the live medium.

Hannigan spends much of the evening trying to master basic technique, while Perry lacks the neurotic edge that Harry needs

The one thing such an effort must avoid at all costs is simply aping the movie — precisely the flaw of When Harry Met Sally. The film gave you fantasy visions of Manhattan: Central Park in the autumn, the famous Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This production is so cramped by the stage that you feel like you're in a Manhattan apartment; Central Park is strangely depicted by giant falling leaves projected onto the back wall. Loveday Ingram's production, with its single white-room set, tries to find a cinematic fluidity using sliding walls to cut between scenes, while film clips of happy couples reminiscing (a successful device in the original) are often projected on a screen in front of the set. It's a good try, but since playwright Marcy Kahan uses much of Ephron's screenplay verbatim there are too many rapid-fire scenes. Every setting change, however brief, disrupts the momentum, and the effect is wearying. The cinematic production simply emphasizes Kahan's failure to find a way of making this work in the theater.

And it's not just the sets that disappoint. Hannigan may be one of Hollywood's most compelling young actresses — onscreen she has a delicious, quirky sense of humor and a rare ability to show depth in even the most shallow characters — but her inexperience on stage is palpable. She looks lovely, lashes fluttering appealingly over her big Disney eyes, but spends much of the evening trying to master basic technique, such as voice projection. You care about Hannigan the actress trying to win through, but Sally gets lost. Perry's Harry is far more comfortable, his comic timing easy and confident. He lacks the neurotic edge that Harry needs, the reason he resists getting too close to anyone, and never quite coheres with Hannigan. Together they exude affability, not chemistry.

The evening is pleasant enough, but it's hardly a sign of success if what you really want to do is hurry home with your loved one to the dvd player and the reassuring embrace of Ryan and Crystal. If Hollywood has one besetting sin these days, it's an overreliance on empty sequels. It's a tragedy to see that reproduced in theater which, once upon a time, was where movie ideas came from.