NEW YORK — Comedy is hard, but it should look effortless, even easy.
"Regrets Only" doesn't. In fact, there's a labored, patchwork quality to Paul Rudnick's uneven new play on view at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club Stage I.
The evening, despite the work of such expert actors as Christine Baranski, George Grizzard, David Rasche, Sian Phillips and Jackie Hoffman, suffers from a stop-and-go script that lurches from joke to joke. Some of them admittedly are quite funny as the play dissects the world of New York's upper crust and the folks who make them beautiful.
Rudnick's heroine is a glamorous Fifth Avenue matron named Tibby McCullough portrayed with style by Baranski, who has been dressed most glamorously by costume guru William Ivey Long. He has put her in several smashing outfits including a formfitting, strapless, red gown that says oodles about the woman's social status and way of life.
That life includes a friendship with an aging well-known gay clothes designer named Hank Hadley, played by Grizzard. Hank has just lost his partner of nearly four decades, and he reminisces with affection about their relationship.
Just then, Tibby's well-connected lawyer husband (Rasche) reveals he has been tapped by the president (yes, George W.) to "fine-tune" a potential constitutional amendment. In other words, the attorney explains, to "come up with a more workable and ironclad definition of legal marriage — between a man and a woman."
The new job causes a riff between Tibby and Hank, a divide exacerbated by the fact that Hank is designing the wedding dress for Spencer, Tibby's soon-to-be-married daughter (a strident Diane Davis).
Hank gets his revenge in Act 2, which is when Rudnick's comedy of manners takes a sudden "Twilight Zone" turn. All of gay New York decides to take the day off, meaning poor Spencer's wedding ceremony will be abandoned by florists, hair stylists, high-fashion designers and more. Also not working: just about everybody on Broadway, although a play by David Mamet is still running.
The underused Phillips, as Baranski's much-married, grande-dame mother, shows up for the wedding wearing a dress made out of garbage bags and shoe boxes on her feet. It seems her couturier is absent, too.
Despite Grizzard's warm presence, the character of Hank turns preachy during all this hullabaloo. He coats his sermonizing with a bit of awkward sentimentality that director Christopher Ashley can't smoothly work into the proceedings.
Rudnick is a master quipster. He throws out hilarious one-liners with the speed of an ace pitcher. And this cast can bat them out of the ballpark.
So it's weird to think of something or someone supplying even more comic diversion in a Rudnick laugh fest. But that job has been assigned to Hoffman, who plays Myra, "the only white, Jewish maid in Manhattan." Myra is a woman so bored by her job that she changes her costume and accent — Irish, German, French, etc. — every time she makes a very conspicuous entrance.
As giddy as the moments are, they detract from the play, making it seem more scattered than it already is. And "Regrets Only" needs all the focus Rudnick and company can muster.
