Two years before Noel Coward wrote “Present Laughter” in 1939, Dale Carnegie first published his formula for winning friends and influencing people: Never criticize, condemn nor complain.

So however dissatisfying I found the Broadway revival of “Present Laughter” that has now opened at the American Airlines Theater, I will say upfront in my best attempt at a winning manner that it has a sumptuous Art Deco set, gorgeous costumes and an attractive cast.

Actually, Coward built much of his spectacularly varied career — actor, singer, the author of some 50 produced plays, 20 movies, 300 songs — by ignoring Carnegie’s three-c proscription, but adding a c of his own…always charm.

That seems to be the motto as well of the great matinee idol Garry Essendine in “Present Laughter,” which is no coincidence: Coward himself played the role in the original British production and in a 1955 U.S. tour. “Present Laughter” is also said to be Coward’s most autobiographical play.

“Everybody worships me; it’s nauseating,” Garry says in his London studio, dressed in silk pajamas and a dressing gown.

“There’s hell to pay if they don’t,” his personal secretary cracks knowingly in reply.

Garry, who has been a star for some 20 years (as had Coward when he wrote the play), is tired of all the attention, but not really. He is at the center of “a constellation of gossipy little planets circling round the great glorious sun” — staff, fans, business associates, old friends, hangers-on, people who want something from him and, above all, would-be intimates. These are people who find him “the most charming, infuriating, passionately attractive man I have ever known in my life,” and whom he conquers and then fends off with practiced aplomb:

“I’m ridiculously happy,” says a lovely young aristocratic lady whom he bedded for the night. “Are you?”

“There’s something awfully sad about happiness, isn’t there?” he says — just the kind of nonsense a rogue would say. For all his womanizing, he is still married to his first wife, although she left him years ago and now comes back to keep him out of trouble: “Think what fun it would be to be unattractive for a minute or two, ” she says to him to sway him from his compulsive romancing. (The autobiographical correlation at this point is limited; far from being a serial womanizer, Coward reportedly told friends that he had never slept with a woman.)

The forgettable plot hinges on the powerful attraction Garry holds for women, setting off a complicated love triangle (hexagon?) the point of which is to generate farce-like mayhem.

A character full of vanity, vitriol, histrionics but also sexual magnetism, the role of Garry Essendine has been essayed by a long list of stellar performers of the stage and screen, as disparate as Albert Finney, Ian McKellen and George C. Scott. The 1996-97 Broadway revival starred Frank Langella (with Allison Janney playing his wife). The newest Garry is Victor Garber, four-time Tony nominee who is probably best known to the fans of the “Alias” television series. His picture graces the Playbill cover, sleek white mane, smoking jacket, cigarette holder with the smoke drifting elegantly over his left shoulder. The promise of that elegant profile is an evening of fast-paced repartee.

“Present Laughter” certainly had its moments, but Garber is too placid a presence to have kept my interest through a play that lasts 150 minutes over three acts, and while he’s attractive, it seems closer to a Woody Allen fantasy sequence than a Noel Coward parlor comedy that these beautiful women decades younger are swooning from love for him. Still, Garber’s steadiness is a welcome contrast to some odd and unsuccessful efforts to pump up the energy, most noticeably Brooks Ashmanskas, who plays a beseeching playwright in one of the most eccentric performances I have ever seen on Broadway — a herky-jerky whirling dervish who seems imported from the fringe festival. The women fare better, especially Harriet Harris as the wise-cracking secretary, Lisa Banes as his wife Liz and Pamela Jane Gray as the predatory wife of his producer (she is helped along by some eye-catching outfits by costume designer Jane Greenwood).

The character of the playwright, however, has what may be the cleverest line in the play: “All you do with your talent is to wear dressing-gowns and make witty remarks, where you might be really helping people, making them think, making them feel.” This was Noel Coward the playwright writing lines to say to Noel Coward the actor who was playing a character who was a stand-in for Noel Coward the witty self-made real-life character who wore dressing gowns and wrote plays. That should at least make you think.

Follow me on my New York Theater Twitter account.

—

Present Laughter by Noel Coward
at the American Airlines Theater (227 West 42nd Street) through March 21.
Directed by Nicholas Martin
Sets by Alexander Dodge, costumes by Jane Greenwood, lighting by Rui Rita, sound by Drew Levy, wigs by Tom Watson
Cast:
Victor Garber (Garry Essendine), Brooks Ashmanskas (Roland Maule), Lisa Banes (Liz Essendine), Nancy E. Carroll (Miss Erikson), Alice Duffy (Lady Saltburn), Holley Fain (Daphne Stillington), Pamela Jane Gray (Joanna Lyppiatt), James Joseph O’Neil (Fred), Richard Poe (Henry Lyppiatt), Marc Vietor (Morris Dixon) and Harriet Harris (Monica Reed)
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes with two intermission
Ticket prices: $66.50 – $116.50

Photographs by Joan Marcus of Victor Garber and Harriet Harris

Email