Simonized

LITTLE ME Book by Neil Simon

Music by Cy Coleman

Lyrics by Carolyn Leigh

Choreography by Peter Gennaro

Who lives on the wrong side of the tracks after the tracks are torn up? Neil Simon has reworked and revived his 1962 musicomedy farce, complete with Cy Coleman's winningly melodic score, but he cannot restore its sociological geography. His brassy heroine, the evocatively named Belle Poitrine (Mary Gordon Murray), a non-lady who is a bona fide tramp, wants to acquire culture, fame, wealth and social acceptance. In 1982, culture is a two-syllable word that has disappeared from most vocabularies, and a bona fide tramp has a hammerlock on fame, wealth and social acceptance, provided she selects the right ghostwriter to indite her saucy memoirs.

This is not to say that Little Me is not still funny, but one tends to laugh at it more than with it. In the original, Belle's many lovers and husbands were all played by Sid Caesar in a performance of virtuosic hilarity. Here they are divided between James Coco and Victor Garber. Garber is the rich little rich boy who first stirs Belle's precocious nubility. Coco, a clown in the grand lineage of Bert Lahr, is wonderfully funny throughout, especially as a Teutonic film director with a disconcerting resemblance to Benito Mussolini.

Neil Simon is probably tired of hearing that his work subsists on absurdist non sequiturs, deli-flavored New York humor and crisp punch-liners. So what else is new? Not Little Me, alas.

—T.E.K.