MILLBURN, N.J. – So, all those times Ralph Kramden balled his fist in Alice’s face and threatened to give her one “right in the kisser”? Send her – bang! zoom! – “to the moon”? Well, as he explains to her apologetically in the new musical version of their ’50s sitcom, “The Honeymooners,” he never really would have gone through with it.
Phew! I guess it’s sort of imperative, in reviving the story of Ralph and Alice in 2017 – as occurs in this ultra-bland concoction, having its world premiere at Paper Mill Playhouse here – that audiences be reassured that eternally hapless Ralph is not forever in the preparatory stage of beating his wife. That would make for, to say the least, a musical comedy playing out on the fringes of what we now understand to be criminal intent.
But setting the record straight 60 years later while sprinkling a tediously overlong production with catchphrases that would have meaning for only the oldest of audience members feels like a thin premise on which to hang a musical. And that is indeed the sensation left by “The Honeymooners,” as directed by John Rando and featuring an admirably uncanny impersonation of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph by the steady musical-theater actor Michael McGrath.
I decided to venture out to Paper Mill’s expansive and comfy theater because I watched the ever-present reruns of the 39 episodes of “The Honeymooners” as a kid in the 1960s. They seemed at the time diverting half-hours, owing to the Abbott-and-Costello chemistry of Gleason and the great Art Carney, who played bus driver Ralph’s irrepressible sidekick, sewer worker Ed Norton. (In Millburn, Michael Mastro reanimates Carney’s portrayal heroically, and fondly.) I was also curious to see what resulted in a stage version, with book by Dusty Kay and Bill Nuss, music by Stephen Weiner and lyrics by Peter Mills, because the project had been developed by producer Jeffrey Finn, who is now the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.
The TV show was notable as a true blue-collar sitcom, following the travails of blustery but insecure Ralph, forever scheming to rise out of hardscrabble Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and into a life of riches and ease. It was also somehow unbearably sad, mostly because of the dingy cell-like existence to which Audrey Meadows’s Alice was condemned. She made a home for penny-pinching Ralph in a depressing apartment furnished with not even the most basic of conveniences, not a telephone or a refrigerator. Meanwhile, Norton lived in relative middle-class splendor upstairs with wife, Trixie, played on the full TV series version by Joyce Randolph. (The comedy was revived later as part of Gleason’s variety show.)
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As it happens, integrating a garden-variety Broadway score into the story of Ralph and Norton once again trying to make it big, this time as advertising jingle writers – and I won’t reveal what a shameless sop to sentimentality is the show’s conclusion – adds little to “The Honeymooners.” Leslie Kritzer, who plays Alice, gets to show off her appealing musical range, and Laura Bell Bundy’s Trixie (now depicted as a former star of burlesque) has been saddled with a subplot that Adelaide might have inhabited after exiting “Guys and Dolls.” Choreographer Josh Bergasse guides a chorus of dancing bus drivers through incongruously upbeat numbers such as “The Madison Avenue Line,” meant to evoke a golden-age Broadway in the time of the Kramdens. In this outing, that era feels as if it has had its ticket punched once too often.
