THE SUNSHINE BOYS
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Happily, however, Neil Simon can take you back to the glory days. Though his career began after vaudeville’s decline, the King of Gags honed his comic writing on anything-for-a-laugh classic burlesque–its one-liners, double and triple takes, pratfalls, slapstick, slow burns, spit takes, and punch lines; you can taste them in the stuff he wrote for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, The Phil Silvers Show, and Simon’s incredibly popular plays, films, and musicals, especially the sidesplitting Little Me.
Simon’s love for vaudeville’s spunky veterans shines throughout The Sunshine Boys. Lewis and Clark, ex-vaudevillians who have feuded for 12 years, attempt to revive their act for a television salute to old-time comedy. Vaudevillian in its petty absurdities, the real-life wrangling of the former Sunshine Boys is no less ridiculous than the sketch they try to revive. But to Lewis and Clark the reunion is deadly serious: Clark has never forgiven Lewis for breaking up the act in order to become a stockbroker. And Simon makes us care as much as he makes us laugh. His cantankerous characters may burst into their own little vaudeville sketches–Simon loves to spoof their senility affectionately–but like the memorable coots in Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport (which owes a lot to Simon’s play), they never forfeit a moment of truth.
In National Jewish Theater’s excellent revival the laughs are bountiful and gut busting. But that’s to be expected from Tom Gianas, a Second City director who knows–and shows–how many of Simon’s supposedly realistic lines are in fact burlesque bits. But Gianas also drives home the squabbling duo’s late-blooming yearnings: not to be forgotten, to share old laughs with a new generation, to connect with each other and with their past–because only in each other is their past vivid, especially when they kvetch. Simon put a lot of love into these characters, and Gianas puts it all on the stage.
