One-liners from a sitcom pro
Some day there will be a romantic comedy that doesn’t invite the word “bittersweet,” where old age does not bring wisdom, grace, apology for past mistakes, a life-affirming glow of reconciliation and forgiveness, and one-liners about being down and not being able to get up. The Last Romance, currently running at the Mayfield, is not it.
What The Last Romance, by the American playwright Joe DiPietro, does contribute to your entertainment prospects, however, is an agreeable affirmation that charming, skilled actors, and a gimmick, will get you a long way, even in a comedy that wears its calculations on its sleeve, so to speak.
Take Jamie Farr, the 60-year showbiz veteran who, as an octogenarian himself (since Canada Day), is playing lonely but still spirited octogenarian widower Ralph. (Earlier this week, Farr took ill during one of the performances and had to go to hospital in an ambulance, but he recovered quickly and was back onstage on Tuesday night.)
Farr, whose comic timing can be traced back to the TV series M*A*S*H where he was a laugh magnet as cross-dressing Corporal Klinger, is an expert at putting exactly the right kind of spin on one-liners that in other hands would limp to the finish line and leave people apologizing abjectly to Neil Simon. He is a veritable poster boy for experience that can make something enjoyable of something rather meagre.
Example: “She looks like a throw rug that can bark,” says Ralph impulsively when he catches sight of a small dog belonging to the reserved non-ethnic older woman he’s chatting up in the dog park. “Are you sick?” Carol wonders, after trying to ascertain whether there’s a Mrs. Ralph, dead or alive. “No, I’m 80.”
A natural ability to be quirky but genial will stand Farr in good stead in the course of The Last Romance. Joan Gregson is also very good in the role of the prim, purse-lipped classy dame who, it will not amaze you to discover, has to learn to loosen up before she loses her last chance at romance. And as the third angle in this romance “triangle,” there’s Ralph’s bossy, furiously controlling sister Rose who, as played by Maralyn Ryan, is the most amusing character in the play for most of its duration as she announces that there’s veal scaloppine for dinner as if the world had just been saved from nuclear annihilation.
“My brother is still quite the catch,” she sniffs at Carol, her competition for Ralph’s attention. “He can still drive at night.” Rose, too, has something to learn in the course of The Last Romance. That’s just how these things go. But you can’t help feeling a little targeted; you can tell when a playwright is thinking demographic instead of audience.
As for the gimmick, it’s unusual and smart. The younger Ralph, a figment of Ralph’s nostalgia, is an opera singer, played by the lustrous-voice baritone Michael Nyby, who does indeed come from that world. Ralph had the dream of singing at the Met; he auditioned and everything. And opera gives The Last Romance a metaphor and a parallel, and Ralph something to work with when he’s explaining what’s wrong with his life in old age. “Music makes them bigger,” he says of the characters in opera. “Someone loves someone but it doesn’t work out.”
Ralph’s life, by contrast, with its cautious routines, is seeming a little too unoperatically small for his personality. And meeting Carol makes it pop out at the seams: “I can come on a little strong,” he allows by way of explanation. All this is staged with finesse by director Ron Ulrich, on Carmon Arlett’s attractively autumnal set (lighted by Daniela Masellis). And there’s nothing like opera, thrillingly sung at all the most intense turning-point moments, to up the emotional ante.
You can’t help suspecting, though, that the playwright has thought of the ending first, and calculated everything in reverse. After invoking a selection of old age medical hazards, strokes and failures of memory and the rest, not to mention the life lessons in the process of being affirmed, the storytelling doesn’t quite make sense in Act II. “Life gets in the way,” says octogenarian Ralph, reviewing his crossroad moments.
Too true, of course. But so does intermission.