Plaza Suite review and star rating: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick are commanding in joint West End debut ★★★★
Last night, Uptown: New York’s most iconic real life couple, live on the London stage. Too many things are called iconic when they aren’t, but in the case of Plaza Suite it’s a fair description.
Parker is making her West End debut in this campy Neil Simon comedy play and it’s a joyous night at the theatre. Mostly because it turns out watching two Hollywood actors who are married IRL lark about live is darn good fun. Who knew? (Well, most of us actually, that’s why tickets are going for £300 for the good seats.)
As for Sarah Jessica Parker, she reveals a talent for slapstick comedy that she kept quiet on Sex and the City. She’s all silly dancing and clown facing through three characters (the play is split into vignettes) and she handles emotion well, too. At other times it feels properly tense.
Most of that joy derives from the fact this show is an obvious a star vehicle – and that’s totally justified. You don’t need a more intelligent reason to go to the theatre than to see your favourite celeb, and thank goodness these two explode with chemistry. The trouble with star casting can be if it becomes too pervasive; if half of West End show cast lists are hogged by film and TV talent then it can suggest our pipeline of new stage talent is in trouble. But in this case it feels justified.
Plaza Suite presents try-their-best types who are easy to empathise with because they’re within each of us.
Anyway, back to the show, and Parker and Broderick play three pairs of romantically entwined people passing through the same hotel suite at the Plaza hotel in New York. First performed in 1968 and then again in 1970, Neil Simon’s drawing room comedy wasn’t staged again until 2022 when this John Benjamin Hickey production played Broadway.
All of the luvvie hurrahs said and done, it’s impossible not to wonder how Plaza Suite would go down without two major celebs in the lead roles. Whether it would feel flatter without the fanatical audience carrying the duo with supportive laughter at almost every line.
It makes sense why Plaza Suite wasn’t staged for so long: Neil Simon’s play is good, but not great. Like with his contemporary Noel Coward, the style feels dated, with lots of hamming up to the audience with ostentatious stage entrances and exits. The comedies from the middle of last century made in this style that still get stagings tend to be the already famous ones, like Coward’s Private Lives. Not that it isn’t interesting rebirthing Plaza Suite, but it would have been more interesting, and certainly more challenging for the talent, to put these two talented actors in something more up to date.
Nevertheless, Simon has crafted properly textured characters, mostly in the first vignette in which Parker plays an exasperated housewife who discovers her husband is having an affair. Booking the Plaza suite for a romantic anniversary night, the two fall out and she asks him to leave, but eventually accepts the mistress and begs him to stay, unable to imagine a life alone. You realise she can shout all she wants but her bark will never bite. At its best, Plaza Suite presents three thoughtfully sketched iterations of people on the brink, mainly women. People you can visualise, people each of us know, the types of try-their-best types who are easy to empathise with because they’re within each of us.
In act two Broderick shows his colours, morphing hilariously from tense-shouldered bore to effervescent creative. He shimmies onto stage in more ostentatious clothing as a lauded film director who is staging a rendezvous with a fling from his youth. It’s a howler, especially from Parker, who throws herself into the farcical bits, exaggerating her facial and body movements like a doll being yanked around by a precocious child. Watch out for some truly naff dancing at the outro, some stellar work by Hickey to extract even more playfulness from the pair, who overall seem so up comfortable in Plaza Suite you sometimes feel like you’re watching them mess about in their own Manhattan living room, not a fake hotel suite on a massive West End stage, and we really shouldn’t be watching.
For the final act the piece changes tack into something more existential, with Parker in Sex and the City-like glad rags to give those paying a whopping sum for a seat exactly what they want.
Parker bent down to wave profusely at fans as the curtain lowered, making sure every few metres of theatre had been waved at. Those in their sparkly gold sequined outfits had got their money’s worth.
Plaza Suite plays until 13 April at the Savoy Theatre
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