Did Critics Moon Over Elaine May's After the Night and the Music?

The first Broadway production of the 2005-2006 season has arrived. Manhattan Theatre Club's world premiere of Elaine May's After the Night and the Music opened at the Biltmore Theatre on June 1. Did critics think the trio of three short plays adds up to a satisfying evening of theater?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Eric Grode in his Broadway.com Review: "After seemingly rebounding from a dreary debut season, Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway venture takes an astonishing leap backward with After the Night and the Music. This leaden collection of one-acts by Elaine May, a one-time fixture of stage comedy whose work has been very uneven for some time now, aspires to mediocrity and only occasionally reaches it… Shows more tedious than After the Night and the Music will probably surface before this brand-new season is over. But the bar has been set rather high."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "The word 'play' suggests a degree of substance that does not apply to the wispy comic vignettes that make up After the Night and the Music… Though they have been given a full-dress production by the Manhattan Theater Club, what are being performed here are irrefutably skits, the theatrical equivalent of unshaded line drawings or portraits by sidewalk artists. Now skits can sometimes sting, delight and surprise while leaving a lingering tattoolike impression. But as you watch Ms. May's new collection of quick takes on urban angst, they mostly seem to dissolve before your eyes, as if they had been written in disappearing ink or configured on a self-erasing Etch A Sketch screen."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Invariably, May's essentially cartoon sensibility--perhaps fair enough for blackout sketches--confuses irony with humor and the unexpected with wit. Worse, the dialogue is churned out by stereotypes ineffectually posing as people, like the disillusioned gay watching The Wizard of Oz on his DVD player. Come on--there's more real life in a fish tank. The settings by John Lee Beatty are serviceably chic, Peter Kaczorowski's lighting shows more imagination than the writing and Michael Krass' costumes are cleverer. Daniel Sullivan's staging does all with the evening that conventionality can, but the acting, Smith-Cameron's apart, is variable, from the agreeable Korbich, to an acceptable Jeannie Berlin and Brian Kerwin, to an appalling Jere Burns."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "No one ever topped Mike Nichols and Elaine May in the art of comic improvisation that brought them fame 45 years ago. Each of the three one-acts in May's After the Night and the Music suggests an improvisation. Only one of them, however, successfully carries through the spirit of playfulness and wit that once seemed effortless. The evening might be more satisfying if the one that really works, 'Curtain Raiser,' were retitled 'Encore' and done at the end."

David Rooney of Variety: "It takes either audacity or lunacy to bill your work 'about life in the new millennium' when your comic engine appears to have stalled in the 1970s. A lesbian who can only lead on the dance floor? A divorcee waiting for a man to call? A gay man sobbing through The Wizard of Oz? A swingers party with an aerobics instructor? Elaine May may not be resorting to mother-in-law jokes in her trio of new one-act plays, After the Night and the Music, but her terrain is almost as far from the cutting edge. Despite its fitful laughs and occasional reminders of the humorist's facility with a neurotica-fueled zinger, this slight offering of second-rate comic sketches looks like a fraudulent tenant in a Broadway house, perhaps even more so given the polished staging of Daniel Sullivan. While the cast is agreeable enough, the production's chief salvation comes via the staccato timing of J. Smith-Cameron, an always incisive actress deserving of better material."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Director Daniel Sullivan moves matters as quickly as possible. Yet despite the evening clocking in at only two hours and Korbich's galvanizing performance in the first playlet, these sitcom sketches seem to go on far too long."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "After the Night and the Music, a trio of one-acts that the Manhattan Theatre Club opened on Broadway last night at its Biltmore Theatre, includes enough referential throwbacks to fill a trunk: single-line telephones, gays watching The Wizard of Oz, swinging married couples. And yet, Daniel Sullivan has directed a crackling cast of comic-ambiguity specialists with affection and, maybe, the profound relief of being far away from his misadventure earlier this season with Denzel Washington and Julius Caesar. Yes, the motivating conflict in two of the three plays would vanish with the introduction of a cell phone or the acknowledgment of e-mail. But as a couple of hours with May reminds us, technology and sociology change, but the humor of insecurity lasts forever."