Cactus Flower
Opening Night: February 24, 2011
Closing: April 24, 2011
Theater: Westside Theatre
Cactus Flower tells the story of Julian Winston (Maxwell Caulfield), a handsome, middle-aged Park Avenue dentist and bachelor, who, to evade commitment, tells his much younger girlfriend Toni that he is married. When Toni demands to meet his fictional wife (Lois Robbins), hilarity ensues!
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March 10, 2011
Summer theater has come early to New York. It’s still a bit brisk for outdoor Shakespeare, and the various festivals (Fringe and otherwise) have yet to infiltrate downtown en masse. But summer stock — that durable constellation of musty titles and formerly marginally famous performers — makes a rare appearance in Manhattan with the witless revival of “Cactus Flower” that opened on Thursday night at the Westside Theater Upstairs.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 12, 2011
Scripts can grow dated. Revivals can suffer in comparison to a successful film adaptation. But Westside Theatre’s Off Broadway redo of Cactus Flower — the 1965 Abe Burrows farce that became an acclaimed 1969 film starring Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, and Ingrid Bergman — has even bigger issues. It’s poorly staged, terribly miscast, and just plain difficult to sit through.
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March 14, 2011
There’s nothing wrong with the mediocre revival of Abe Burrows’s sex comedy Cactus Flower that a time machine couldn’t fix. You simply zip back to 1965, show up hungover at the office, sexually harass the secretary, do no work, have a three-martini lunch, return to work, vomit on the elevator boy, harass the secretary some more, punch the clock and head for the bar. Before you know it, you’re in the right frame of mind for a comedy whose opening gag involves a lovelorn girl’s suicide attempt turning into a meet-cute smooch from the next-door neighbor applying mouth-to-mouth. Feminist this show is not.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 11, 2011
There’s nothing wrong with the lame revival of Abe Burrows’ sex comedy “Cactus Flower” that a time machine couldn’t fix. Just zip back to swinging 1965 and you’ll be in the right frame of mind for a comedy that finds laughs in philandering dentists, ditzy blondes and wink-wink sexual politics.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 10, 2011
Why would a savvy producer like Daryl Roth ("August: Osage County," "Proof," etc.) mount a faded 1965 blossom like "Cactus Flower"? Maybe because a revival of "Boeing-Boeing," another farce of roughly the same era, was such a hit two seasons ago? Perhaps she hopes to cash in on "Mad Men" nostalgia? Could it be the fact that the play also serves as the basis for a current Adam Sandler movie, "Just Go With It"? Whatever the reason, this dated clunker arrives at Off-Broadway’s Westside Theatre, after a run at Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre, badly in need of an oil change and four new tires.
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