Word: klugman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BOTTOM LINE: Tony Randall and Jack Klugman play another odd couple -- but this time the laughs are like hen's teeth...
Casting is surely the main draw for its season finale, a revival of the flimsy 1935 comedy Three Men on a Horse that opened last week. Randall and his Odd Couple TV partner Jack Klugman are paired for the first time ever in parts other than fussy Felix and macho Oscar -- but not very much other. Randall plays a fey, naive would-be poet who writes greeting-card verses and as a hobby handicaps horse races. Klugman plays a boozing, brawling professional bettor who discovers that Randall never picks the wrong horse and press-gangs him into partnership. In lesser...
Promises, it seems, are made to be broken. The event might be called Three Men in a Hearse. Randall is decades too old for his role and tries to compensate with Shirley Temple cuteness. Klugman, who has had throat surgery, speaks in a rasp that is always painful and only sometimes comprehensible from the seventh row. The play, which George Abbott adapted from John Cecil Holm's work Hobby Horses, was written for the more indulgent audiences of 58 years ago. Perhaps its cheery view of compulsive gambling, drinking until passing out, male dominance and spousal abuse seemed innocuous then...