'Three Men On A Horse' -- Depression Era Comedy Lives Again
Three Men on a Horse
Broadway Bulletin/ Newsvine
HENRY EDWARDS
April 6, 2011
Off-Broadway's TACT/The Actors Company Theatre has added seven performances to the limited run of its production of the Depression-era comedy, "Three Men on a Horse," at the Samuel Beckett Theatre.
Originally scheduled to end on April 16, the comedy will now play its last performance on April 23.
TACT is "dedicated to presenting neglected or rarely produced plays of literary merit," and "Three Men,"co-authored by John Cecil Holm and George ("Mr. Broadway") Abbott, most assuredly fits the bill.
All but forgotten today, the play, nevertheless, has an intriguing history.
"Three Men" arrived on Broadway in the midst of the Great Depression, and beating the odds, it went on to achieve a 13-month run.
Three weeks after it closed, a Warner Bros. film version directed by Mervyn LeRoy and shot in Warners' now legendary gritty, urban style turned up in the nation's movie theatres.
The comedy has since undergone two Broadway revivals, three television productions and two musical adaptations.
Tony Randall, Jack Klugman, Johnny Carson, Jerry Stiller, Julie Hagerty, Jack Carson, Carol Channing, Edward Everett Horton, Eddie Cantor and Jacqueline Susann have performed in various editions.
That the play involves a dozen characters, three acts and several sets have been offered as reasons to explain why it has not been seen in 18 years.
The farcical premise revolves around Erwin Trowbridge (Geoffrey Molloy), a meek, henpecked greeting-card writer with an uncanny knack for picking winning race horses.Wandering into a seedy hotel bar after a spat with his wife Audrey (Becky Baumwoll), the distressed husband encounters a trio of Runyonesque, down-on-their luck, small-time gamblers, Patsy (Gregory Salata) and henchmen Charlie (Jeffrey C. Hawkins) and Frankie (Don Burroughs), and Patsy's ditzy, girlfriend, the former showgirl Mabel (Julianna Zinkel).
Setting out to use Erwin to their advantage, the failed horse players hold the poor sap a virtual prisoner and refuse to allow him to return to his job, forcing his pinchpenny boss Mr. Carver (James Murtaugh) to realize for the first time the indispensability of his missing employee.
Glimpses of the Depression underpin the silliness, but "Three Men" is primarily an amusing tall tale, and one that happens to be deliciously acted by every member of the ensemble.
Screwball comedies scream out for actors who make odd and eccentric characters their specialty, and Don Burroughs, unleashing a bushel full of deadpan facial expressions as the "Guys and Dolls" prototype Frankie, and James Murtaugh, who transforms Mr. Carver into an uncontrollably twitchy, riotously funny bundle of nerves, are especially skilled at conjuring the madness.
In typical TACT tradition, director Scott Alan Evans provides a loving and respectful production. Prior to the play proper, he creates a delightful sequence staged in front of designer Brett J. Banakis' eye-catching show curtain that allows audience members to cast bets on cut out horses bearing such names as "Hoof Hearted" and "I Need Da Money."
It's a joyous way to launch a lovely evening.