‘The Imaginary Invalid’ Review: Molière Gets Clowned By A Winning Bill Irwin

The La-Z-Boy-style brown leather recliner that’s a focal point of Bill Irwin‘s The Imaginary Invalid opening tonight on Broadway doesn’t really mesh with the eye-popping 17th Century French frills and finery that suggest a stage invasion of brilliantly plumed vainglorious peacocks, but no matter. Irwin knows how to clown an audience, and in this enjoyable, broadly comic interpretation, the buffoonery is at least as much the point as some pointed critiques of modern-day American health care.

Styles that might butt heads in most contexts fall loonily into place in Irwin’s puckish universe, a place wherein characters can seem possessed by the slapstick-happy ghosts of dead vaudevillians one moment and recite the pointed social commentary of truth-telling jesters the next. Does it always work? More than you’d have a right to expect.

In adapting Molière’s 1673 three-act comédie-ballet for Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre Company, Irwin, forever carrying the banner of the clowning style on which he is an expert – think Pierrot crossed with Harold Lloyd – cuts the ballet dance-and-musical parts (more or less, but no spoilers here) in favor of a pared down, fast-moving, 90-minute sketch filled with gorgeous, color-coded costumes from Karen Perry and an acting approach from all concerned that’s every bit as loud as those Louis XIV get-ups.

At its frequent best (and as directed by Brandon J. Dirden), this take is lots of fun. The plot, though streamlined, is accented with some verbal modernisms in keeping with that reclining easy chair, as if slipped in to keep things askew.

Irwin plays Argan, a wealthy hypochondriacal aristocrat (attired like some Frenchified, night-capped Ebenezer Scrooge) who spends his days worried about his latest imagined illness and summoning his servants, doctors, wife, daughter and brother to his side mostly to help him indulge in his health obsession.

Those folks, of course, have lives and concerns of their own. Wife Béline (Crystal A. Dickinson) mostly wants hubby to really get sick and die already so she can inherit the fortune. Brother Béralde (Dylan Baker) just wants Argan to face reality and schemes to get it done. Daughter Angélique (Ava Lalezarzadeh) only has eyes and attention for her handsome new beloved Cleante (Daniel Croix Henderson) and needs to figure out a way to convince her stubborn dad that the beau is her perfect match and so what if he’s not a doctor.

Servant Toinette (Rachel Bloom) is more than happy to assist Angélique in any way possible, in part because she knows true love when she sees it but more likely because she enjoys getting one over on the demanding old fool who employs her. There are accommodating doctors (the wonderful Brooks Ashmanskas), forever ready with the cure-all enemas upon which Argan insists, and a goofy doctor’s son (Hiram Delgado) who Argan wants for a son-in-law.

Farce, as you might expect, ensues, with various plots and plans and motivations slamming into one another as the brilliantly attired cast comes and goes and swirls around the sedentary Argan. Beowulf Boritt’s 17th Century great room is as lovely as it is efficient, with panels and doors providing easy access in and out of the action for the ever-busy characters. (Their comings and goings are easy to keep track of, thanks to the color-coded costumes – each character is assigned a dominant color scheme, so much so that brother Béralde is once referred to as “the green man.”)

No need to point out that complications get ever more complicated, that it’ll all work out in the end and that this fine cast knows just how to maneuver the farce and deliver the bons mots. Bloom, as the jester-like truth-teller, is a stand-out, pointedly delivering her lines with a modern-sounding ease rather than the amusing Mid-Atlantic upper crusty thespianism the posher characters utilize.

But Irwin, of course, is the draw here. Even the most clown-phobic among us – and, yes, a little panto can indeed go a long way – might be won over anytime this rubber-limbed, clay-faced sui generis performer enters a room. This, after all, is a man who can upstage even while all-but-permanently seated on an otherwise motion-filled stage. When he was last on Broadway in the brilliant Eureka Day, Irwin proved that he could convincingly inhabit a normal human absent as any trace of the harlequin, but no such restrictions are required for The Imaginary Invalid.

Indeed, the man who once held his own against both Robin Williams and Steve Martin in an Off Broadway production of Waiting For Godot gets free reign to clown around here, especially in a lovely moment that closes the show. That La-Z-Boy doesn’t stand a chance.

Title: The Imaginary Invalid
Venue: Broadway’s Todd Haines Theatre
Written By: Molière, adapted by Bill Irwin from a translation by Doug Skinner
Directed By: Brandon J. Dirden
Cast: Bill Irwin, Brooks Ashmanskas, Dylan Baker, Rachel Bloom, Hiram Delgado, Crystal A. Dickinson, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh
Running Time: 1 hr 30 min (no intermission)