Theater: Maharajah & the Cricket

• Share

At the Drop of Another Hat brings Michael Flanders and Donald Swann back to Broadway, for the first time since 1960, in a sprightly Mardi Gras of hilarity. These two Britons are suave, witty, sly, jaunty and civilized; as comics, their mastery of timing would shame a Swiss watch.

Physically, they are an antipodal pair.

Swann is a bespectacled cricket on a piano bench. He and his piano both chirp. Flanders, confined to a wheelchair by polio, looks like a maharajah temporarily deprived of his turban, bearers and ceremonial umbrella. He possesses the slightly disdainful aplomb, though not the waspish irascibility of a black-bearded Monty Woolley. When the two sing together in revue style, their words dance—whether it be a mock blues about the unrequited love of a nearsighted armadillo for an abandoned tank or a toast to the second law of thermodynamics in a foaming Einstein of boozy intellectual suds that tweaks the audience for not knowing what the first law is.

Urbanely voluble, Flanders does most of the talking, and he can switch-hit a cliche or a platitude with deceptive ease:

"If God had intended us to fly, he would never have given us the railway." One of Hat's high points is a wickedly malicious monologue on the art of olive-stuffing, in which he reduces the mystique of bullfighting to the noble, tragic grandeur of a pimento impaled on a cocktail pick. On those exceedingly rare occasions that Donald Swann opens his mouth, he can be equally and extravagantly nutty—as when he remarks on infant care: "If you put a baby in the bath and it turns red, it's too hot for your elbow." Inevitably, a few eggs are laid in the making of a comic omelet, but Flanders and Swann scramble their humor with such pixy princeliness that it becomes a royal banquet of mirth.