Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The sound of an audience laughing out loud is something to be cherished — especially if it’s live, and you’re there among the people. One of the classics of old-school American comedy returns, in style, to the stage here, after an absence of two decades. And with Teatro Live!’s revival of The Odd Couple, Neil Simon’s 1965 comedy, his most produced and popular, you too can have that experience.
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The great (and oft under-valued) skill of playwright Simon is to turn a remarkable supply of zingy one-liners into full-fledged characters. Especially a challenge, perhaps, when those characters are as definitive in the culture as Felix and Oscar, the mismatched newly single roommates of The Odd Couple. It’s a challenge to which Belinda Cornish’s production, beautifully cast and with bench strength beyond the stars, rises in a hilarious way.
We hear of Felix Unger (Andrew MacDonald-Smith) and Oscar Madison (Alexander Ariate) before we actually see them — the neatnik neurotic and the easy-going slob, respectively — from their poker-playing buddies.
The Friday night game location is the latter’s eight-room Upper West Side apartment, reduced by the born-again bachelor to an epic mess of empties, strewn towels, laundry, chip bags (set design: Lieke den Bakker). The refreshments are suspect; Oscar’s fridge has been broken for two weeks. “There’s milk standing up that isn’t even in the bottle,” says one of the guys. Oscar’s game night “buffet” consists of a green or brown sandwiches (“either very new cheese or very old meat”). When Felix brings the food, by contrast, it’s “cream cheese and pimiento on date-nut bread.
Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
Oscar the slovenly sportswriter is broke (he’s strapped for rent and behind on alimony); Felix, the uptight, obsessively fastidious television news writer whose wife has just left him, needs a place to live. Does this entirely incompatible pair have a hope in hell of successful co-habitation? The odds-against quotient is, of course, the comic ground zero of The Odd Couple. The new room-mates drive each other crazy. And the architecture of the story is built on the the way the frictions of this shotgun “marriage” bring to the foreground the reasons why each of their wives got fed up and left them. Ariate and MacDonald-Smith, both expert comic actors, are uproarious as Oscar and Felix.
Fresh from a very fine performance as Horse (a horse) in Horseplay at Workshop West, Ariate’s Oscar has a lovable and breezy sense of largesse about him that makes even his most mordant one-liners seem like his interpretation of cosmic joking around. Oscar, who has never poured a drink he didn’t slop (the audience goes Oooo collectively when he knocks the nut bowl to the floor), is not only impossible to squelch by mere criticism, he rises, albeit off the couch, to it. He is a man energized by exasperation.
His depressive and neurotic room-mate, whom he memorably describes as “the only man in the world with clenched hair,” is, in MacDonald’s performance, a morose and adenoidal master of the passive-aggressive. Tall and lanky (even his pants are uptight), Felix enters the room legs first, shoulders slumped, a veritable sight gag in himself. His hypochondria (“on New Year’s Eve he has a Pepto-Bismal,” says Oscar) is a stitch. Listening to Felix “open” his sinuses made the audience shriek with laughter. Watching MacDonald-Smith try to arrange himself in a low chair is a little comic gem. It’s a performance of great physical dexterity and precision.
Felix rises to happiness only when exercising his homemaker’s skill set: his relationship with the vacuum cleaner and the cord is a veritable pas de deux. It’s exactly the kind of obsessive bustling that reduces the affable Oscar to seething fury. “Leave everything alone! I’m not finished dirtying up for the night.”
Clockwise Oscar Derkx, Bernardo Pacheco, Alexander Ariate, Mat Busby, in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifouc
It’s a mark of Cornish’s production that the supporting roles are occupied so amusingly. The poker guys — kitted out by costume designer Leona Brausen, a ’60s expert — are individualized in performance: Garett Ross’s sardonic Speed; Mat Busby’s thoughtfully analytical cop; Oscar Derkx as Vinnie, the naif who consistently fails to read the room; Bernardo Pacheco as Roy the accountant on a short fuse. They make the most of the domestic texture of Simon’s comedy in which we, apparently inadvertently, get to learn telling snippets about all their marriages and kids and jobs.
Kristin Johnston, Jenny McKillop, Alexander Ariate, Andrew MacDonald-Smith in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
And the giggly English Pigeon sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily (“the English Betty Boops,” as Oscar puts it), who arrive for a disastrous double-dinner date, are a hoot in performances by Jenny McKillop and Kristin Johnston. They are an eyeful, as outfitted in 60s flamboyance by Brausen. Their luminous orange chiffon baby doll peignoirs, the plumage of Brit birds, will make you giddy.
It’s one of those comedies that gets wrapped up pretty abruptly in the interests of a happy ending that seems a bit obligatory. And you do wonder how on earth Oscar and Felix ever became friends in the first place. But that’s on Simon, not this Teatro production. There is great vintage fun to be had, revisiting the sights and sounds of the ’60s in this seminal American comedy, and the period views on marriage and divorce, male camaraderie, friendship that go with them. We all had a blast.
REVIEW
The Odd Couple
Theatre: Teatro Live!
Written by: Neil Simon
Directed by: Belinda Cornish
Starring: Alexander Ariate, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Mat Busby, Oscar Derkx, Garett Ross, Bernardo Pacheco, Jenny McKillop, Kristin Johnston
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: through July 27
Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com.
