Plaza Suite
Opening Night: March 28, 2022
Theater: Hudson Theatre
Website: plazasuitebroadway.com
Two-time Tony Award® winner Matthew Broderick and two-time Emmy Award® winner Sarah Jessica Parker are coming to the Broadway stage together for the first time in over 20 years. Headlining the classic comedy Plaza Suite, by legendary playwright and four-time Tony winner Neil Simon, these two world-class actors play three different couples in one famous hotel room. Karen and Sam are a long-married pair whose relationship may be headed for an early checkout. Muriel and Jesse are former high school sweethearts who seem destined for an extended stay. And Norma and Roy are the mother and father of the bride, ready to celebrate their daughter’s nuptials — if only they can get her out of the bathroom.
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March 28, 2022
You could, I suppose, investigate “Plaza Suite” as a catalog of male failings in midcentury America; certainly “The Odd Couple,” a Simon comedy from 1965, can support such a reading, even if its two female characters are birdbrains. In any case, that’s not what the current production is offering. Rather, it seems to hope we will look forgivingly enough on our benighted past to excuse it with a “that’s how things were” shrug and laugh.
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March 28, 2022
Each of the skits of “Plaza Suite” is a little longer than an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and none is as funny or as inventive. It’s no wonder TV replaced Simon.
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March 28, 2022
Alas, the stars’ efforts, while certainly appealing, don’t make the material any less obsolete, a throwback to the bougie boulevard comedies that were once a Broadway staple. The observations on marriage and relationships occasionally generate a chuckle, but more often seem stale and the sexual politics retrograde, something that John Benjamin Hickey’s serviceable direction can’t disguise.
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March 28, 2022
Its main characters are mostly middle-aged, and so is the writing; it is now over 50, and its comic cheek is showing some laugh lines. But the vestiges of laughs are nice wrinkles, as wrinkles go, and while this production doesn’t leave you rolling in the aisles, it is likely to at least leave you smiling.
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March 28, 2022
But while no one checks into the Plaza Hotel expecting ingenuity or surprise, the production now playing the Hudson Theatre feels remarkably removed from the moment. Is it the two-year pandemic delay? Not quite. Retro gender politics, a cumbersome three-act structure and dusty humor? You’ll find all of that and more on the room service menu.
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March 28, 2022
Parker is fine and Beatty’s set is even better; the issues are Parker’s on-stage partner, Matthew Broderick, as well as the fact that Plaza Suite―a dated three-act piece that reads like the white prototype of one of Tyler Perry’s Madea shows―has been revived at all.
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March 28, 2022
There’s something almost radical in 2022 about seeing a Neil Simon comedy staged like a Neil Simon Comedy. Everything about Plaza Suite at the Hudson Theatre, with its gold-trimmed set, modish costumes, bright lighting, and married celebrity actors (Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick) having a ball feels like a throwback to a different theatrical era. Glamorous, chic, gilded — it’s no wonder why John Benjamin Hickey’s new production was one of the highest-grossing shows last week, and, for my money, it’s the unabashed delight of a relatively grim season.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 28, 2022
If those two sat there in pajamas and told knock-knock jokes for two hours, people would be rolling in the aisles. An average ticket price of $212.67 will make a person believe anything. It can turn a Best Western into the Four Seasons.
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March 28, 2022
The usual suspects will stick their noses up at “Plaza Suite” — it’s old, it has no relevance today, blah blah blah — but there is nothing wrong with some good ol’ opulence, one-liners and star power. Everything on Broadway need not be a brooding hipster musical with acoustic guitars and Edison bulbs.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 28, 2022
That said, the pre-sold audience seemed to leave happy, presumably glad that nobody sent this fortitudinous bit of glam old Broadway into rehab for contemporary tastes. The two stars seem pleased to be there, glad to mess with each other’s foibles, happy to commune with a live and empathetic audience again and make no new gossipy headlines.
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March 28, 2022
If anyone was going to make his 1968 Plaza Suite a hit in 2022, it’s Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. Two longtime Broadway darlings, they are as ‘classic New York’ a couple as they come. To say their name is to invoke visions of champagne-washed elegance, of well-heeled strolls through the city’s tony avenues, of effortless bliss. And yet not even SJP’s incandescent star power can brush off the dust settled on this three-act look at marriage in the late ‘60s. Unadorned by John Benjamin Hickey’s straightforward direction, the highly anticipated, pandemic-delayed production does only improve as it goes on, so long as you make it past its dreadful first act.
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March 28, 2022
Directed by John Benjamin Hickey with a clear reverence for Simon and the theatrical era in which his 1968 comedy titillated matinee audiences, this new Plaza Suite feels mostly like an exercise in nostalgia – for a couple we’ve watched grow up, for a Broadway that demands little, and for the late playwright whose contributions to popular culture go far beyond this mid-level effort.
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March 28, 2022
But as a double act for two talented performers with whom the audience has a long and deep relationship, “Plaza Suite” can hardly have been better chosen. The show itself is somewhat lost in time. But Parker and Broderick’s chemistry, expertly honed, makes it feel timeless.
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March 28, 2022
In Plaza Suite, I found that fragile funny-sad balance tipped too far toward melancholy, possibly because Broderick’s left-of-center delivery makes so much room for it. While he’s tremendously antic in Forest Hills, he’s the Tin Man without oil in Mamaroneck. That’s still the one of the three I’m going to remember, though. It’s paralyzingly bleak.
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