Word: klugman
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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...
...Klugman still plays tough guys as well as anyone in terms of face and gesture. But the voice is an essential instrument for an actor, and his now lacks both resonance and nuance. Some spectators ache for him, others squirm in discomfort, but few can immediately lose themselves in the character and story line. Randall, who played comedy with depth and complexity on his TV series Love, Sidney, is hammy onstage, if less excruciatingly so here than in a Feydeau farce last season...
Sitcoms, on the other hand, are cheaper to produce and almost always do well in reruns. The trouble with most of the newcomers is that they look like reruns already. You Again (Jack Klugman as a divorced father) and Tough Cookies (Robby Benson as a Chicago police detective) are about as dumb and hackneyed as the genre gets. CBS's Fast Times, though based on a smart, funny movie about high school life, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is nearly as lame. The problems start with the casting. As Spicoli, the spaced-out surfer played hilariously in the film...