The Sunshine Boys Bring Us Sunshine (And Lots Of Male Bitching!) (westend.broadwayworld.com)

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The Sunshine Boys Bring Us Sunshine (And Lots Of Male Bitching!) *REVIEWS*
Posted: 4/28/12 at 09:18am

Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths are about to hit the West End stage in Neil Simon’s play, 'The Sunshine Boys', about an old-time comedy double-act who can’t stand each other. It’s very funny – but also deadly serious, they tell David Gritten .

It’s a hot afternoon, and as I walk along a corridor next to a rehearsal room at the Jerwood Space, close to London’s South Bank, two of its internal windows are wide open – so it’s easy to hear the voices of two older men with New York accents bickering loudly at each other. This is excellent news: it means rehearsals for the new West End production of Neil Simon’s 1972 comedy 'The Sunshine Boys' are proceeding as planned.

The play is about two elderly vaudevillians called Lewis and Clark, who had a successful act for 43 years, but grew to dislike each other and split up when Lewis decided to retire. They are invited to reunite and do their act one more time for a television network special about the history of comedy – but can they stand to be in the same room?

American Danny DeVito, best known as the grouchy, malevolent Louie in the long-running television comedy 'Taxi', plays Willie Clark, while Britain’s Richard Griffiths, equally famed for playing the teacher Hector in 'The History Boys' and Uncle Monty in the film 'Withnail and I', is Al Lewis.
As soon as their rehearsal break is called, the two actors bound happily into a refreshment room to talk.

One’s first thought is that as a pair they call to mind the title of another famous Neil Simon play – 'The Odd Couple'. Although neither is exactly svelte, it is nevertheless hard to imagine a more sharply contrasting pair.
DeVito, 67, is barely 5ft tall, with a tanned bald pate; he gesticulates wildly as he talks, fast and loud in staccato sentences.
Griffiths, 64, is a bigger man in every way, and boasts an impressive mane of silver hair. He considers his words carefully, but makes them count.

“We’ve been rehearsing two weeks, and it’s been a lot of fun,” says DeVito, beaming. “It’s a great play. It’s a comedy, but it’s not frivolous at all. The first time Richard and I spoke about it on the phone, one thing we went right to was: this is not simply a comedy. It’s got a lot more depth to it, character-wise.
“The other thing is getting to a point where we know the dialogue perfectly. Neil Simon is so precise.”
Griffiths leans forward: “It kills him if you approximate.”

In Britain, 'The Sunshine Boys' is less well known as a stage play than as a film. A big-screen adaptation in 1975 starred Walter Matthau as Clark and George Burns as the irascible Lewis. Burns, who was 79 at the time, won an Oscar as supporting actor – the movie kick-started a late-flowering film career for him.

Griffiths is insistent that the version of 'The Sunshine Boys' he and DeVito will play is Simon’s original. “It’s the one in the Library of Congress,” he says seriously.
“We talked to the director, Thea Sharrock, about it,” DeVito chips in. “She feels very particular about this. We have fun with this play, but she’s pretty much a stickler for the words.”

Neither actor has seen a stage production of 'The Sunshine Boys', though Griffiths clearly recalls the Matthau-Burns film, about which he has reservations: “Having been in a play which was then made into a film ['The History Boys'], I saw they’d done the same thing with 'The Sunshine Boys'. They tried to 'open it up’ for the camera. There’s this desperate desire to open it up because they want to use more locations. But to do that, you have to insert new stuff. So the movie set itself up for a fall. It was unsatisfactory. They took the play and fiddled with it.
“The performances are great – that’s not the problem. But we’re going back to the play, because it’s what Mr Simon wrote.”
And what he wrote was hugely funny, though it’s sour humour, coming from characters who are getting older and are somewhat worn down by life. At one point Lewis tells Clark: “You know what your trouble is, Willy? You always took the jokes too seriously. It was just jokes. We did comedy on the stage for 43 years. I don’t think you enjoyed it once.” Clark replies: “If I was there to enjoy it, I would buy a ticket.”

“The way Neil Simon constructs the whole thing,” DeVito says, “he gives you all the humour, the absurdities, the craziness you expect, but he’s also giving you the glue between these characters, where the glue came apart and what happened to the relationship.
“It’s like a marriage. There are so many things that can pile up, but the marriage is there – there’s a reason you got together. Al Lewis wouldn’t have stuck around as long as he did if he didn’t know it was working. Lewis and Clark did 8,000 shows around the circuit and nailed it every time. The audience was like, falling over. So there was something there. But they were with each other a lot and things deteriorated. It was little things, and finally they couldn’t be around each other.”

Simon is widely thought to have used two real-life old-time American vaudeville acts as his models for Lewis and Clark. Their longevity was inspired by an act called Smith and Dale, who started their two-man act in 1920 and stayed together for 50 years. Though they notoriously bickered with each other, they remained firm friends. The other precursors, Gallagher and Shean, worked together on and off for only a dozen or so years, and, although they were successful, their relationship was a stormy one.
This happens a lot with partnerships in the entertainment industry. Pop groups go the same way: they spend long years on the road together and often fall out. “It’s the way the Beatles came apart,” Griffiths observes. “But everyone out there, the audience, just wanted them to be together, do the music and be happy.”
And never to change, of course. “That’s right,” he says. “But change is inevitable. And I think this whole play is to do with the nature of change, because these two characters are confronted by choice at this point, at the fag-end of their careers.”
But they agree that Simon’s play is partly about the ageing process and, as Griffiths says, “about the intractability of important relationships. It’s so complicated, this thing. Yet these two guys use very simple language. There’s nothing philosophical, tricksy, clever or smart-arse about them whatsoever. They’re comics, they’re stand-up guys. That’s what they do.”

DeVito and Griffiths will not be around long enough to tire of each other’s company: 'The Sunshine Boys' is scheduled for a limited three-month run. But the two men, as different as chalk and cheese, seem to delight in each other and laugh a lot.

They’ll be playing at the Savoy Theatre. “A gorgeous place,” says DeVito, before he starts lapsing into the querulous tones of Lewis and Clark: “But if I could, I’d like to appeal to the Mayor of London, or maybe the Prime Minister, and say: 'Is there a way to put a couple of lifts in there?’ I mean, would it have killed them to put an escalator in for two old guys like us? We gotta go up 50 steps to get to the stage. We got it in our contracts – one day he carries me up, the next day I carry him.”
Of the two, DeVito, who grew up in New Jersey and comes from an Italian-American family, might seem to have the inside track on Lewis and Clark: his “Noo Joisey” accent fits right in for the rhythms of the dialogue Simon wrote for the two vaudevillians.
“But I’m so impressed with Richard’s accent,” he says. “It’s amazing.” Addressing Griffiths, he says: “Sometimes you say things that throw me right off. I hear my relatives sitting around a table talking.” He lapses into “Joisey”: “You doin’ a good job, Mr Griffiths, with that accent!”
Griffiths, clearly touched by the compliment, actually blushes.
“Well,” I tell DeVito, “he’s a national treasure, you know.” Not missing a beat, DeVito says: “Now he’s my treasure, too.”

In fact, Griffiths admits he has not attempted an American accent since 1979, when he appeared in Trevor Nunn’s production of Kaufman and Hart’s 'Once in a Lifetime' at the RSC. (He was nominated for an Olivier award on that occasion.) Still, it’s Griffiths who has a clear advantage in stage experience. While DeVito did a lot of theatre in New York in his younger days (off-Broadway he played Martini in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest', the film that gave him a major career break) he has essentially confined himself to movies and television since the Seventies.
“It’s been a while,” he admits. “But on 'Taxi', I played Louie for five years. And we’d do that show every Friday night in front of an audience of 300 people. Each time, we’d only had the script from Monday. We never did a straight run-through – one of us would screw up a line – but it wasn’t so different.”
Both men insist that Al Lewis and Willie Clark are not mean-minded men, despite the acidity of their humour. “There’s a lot more love in our play than animosity,” DeVito muses. “You hear stories about big stars who berate assistants or do cruel things to a costume designer on set. I don’t think there’s cruelty in this.”
“They’re not bullies, are they?” Griffiths murmurs.
“No, they’re really sweet,” DeVito continues. “But they’re at that time in their life, in their seventies. You spend 43 years doing one thing, and then suddenly you’re either out to pasture or you’re unhappy about not working.
“We embody both of those results of life.” He assumes a voice of doom: “The ticking clock.” Then he cackles: “But it’s funny!”

Updated On: 5/17/12 at 09:18 AM

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