For those who braved the wind and ice, the opening of “Frankie & Johnny in the Clair DeLune” was a minor disappointment. All the hype over nude scenes and censorship just didn’t play out on stage.
While it had all the elements that make for good community theater, they didn’t quite bring about the intended emotional impact.Perhaps the small audience of 20 dampened the mood. But there was a deeper air of inappropriateness that resonated up out of the sets and scenes and made the work come together badly.
Perhaps on another night with another audience, the performance might have worked better. After weeks of planning and rehearsal, performing for so few is hardly inspirational. But in a play like this, balance is everything. Character, setting and the rhythm of events are critical to the whole emotional impact it is trying to achieve. Many of these elements lacked the believability of the original production, making for a rather flat rendition. The disputed nude scenes — absent from the original Manhattan Theater performance in 1987 — were more embarrassing than shocking, diverting attention from the interchange between the two main characters.
Despite the reputation of the play write Terrence McNally, the play itself is structurally flawed, creating a disparity between the first and second act that takes an incredible actress like Kathy Bates from the original to overcome. In the first act, Frankie is a hard-nosed realistic waitress who had been through the romantic grind and has been embittered by it. Candy Joseph does very well in portraying this character, but comes across less believably in the second act when the roles reverse.
The play structure makes less of a demand on Ira Fox. He plays his role consistently throughout, bouncing up and down with the changes. Both actors have charm and grace, presenting their characters without flub or blemish. But they do little to make the audience believe they are as desperate or needy as the play says they should be. Frankie does not come across as an actress reduced to waiting tables as a career. Johnny doesn’t look or feel like a man cast down by divorce and jail. Even the set works against the fiction of the play, looking more a Hoboken studio apartment than a walk-up cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen.
Yet despite the flaws, the magic of theater works here. The people we see are appealing. The dialogue is clever and well delivered. The play does bring about a resolution the audience can understand and applaud.