Born Yesterday Broadway Reviews

But even the babel of fierce combat between the American theater's definitive dumb blonde, Billie Dawn (Nina Arianda), and her abusive lover Harry Brock (Jim Belushi), cannot obscure the occasional sound of creaking at the Cort Theater, where a solid but inessential revival of Garson Kanin's comedy 'Born Yesterday' opened on Sunday night. The celluloid shadow of the wondrous Judy Holliday, who played Billie in the original 1946 Broadway production and the movie directed by George Cukor, inevitably looms large over any revival of 'Born Yesterday.' (Madeline Kahn starred in the only previous Broadway revival, in 1989.) To her immense credit Ms. Arianda, who made a spectacular Off Broadway debut last season as the actress-seductress in David Ives's 'Venus in Fur,' colors this cartoon role with her own set of Crayolas.

The play, which revolves around corruption in big business and politics, couldn't be timelier. And the acting in Doug Hughes' excellent new production couldn't be better or more thrilling, especially from actor Jim Belushi and newcomer Nina Arianda.

The sound that you're hearing at the Cort Theatre these days is one of the rarest in the world: It's the collective purr of an audience falling in love with a brand-new face. Nina Arianda made a huge impression on everyone who saw her make her professional stage debut last year in the Off-Broadway premiere of David Ives's 'Venus in Fur.' Now she's playing the not-so-dumb-blonde in a Broadway revival of Garson Kanin's 'Born Yesterday,' the play that put Judy Holliday on the map in 1946 and is going to do the same thing for Ms. Arianda. Ms. Arianda is a charismatic comedienne who is as funny as she is sexy, and anyone capable of resisting her charms is both blind and deaf.

Belushi paints all this with size and spirit, but also with sensitivity, a word you might not expect to find applied to the acting of such a role. Loud, crude, and ugly on the surface, this Harry Brock shows a flickering helplessness underneath. Just menacing enough to be genuinely scary, he never lets the hints of pathos soften him into a Damon Runyon cartoon gangster. Staunchly unlovable, he's also clearly a person who needs love, and we can all identify with that.

So, what does it take to drain the humor from a classic Broadway comedy like 'Born Yesterday?' Garson Kanin's stinging 1946 satire on the unholy (and apparently eternal) business alliances struck by avaricious American entrepreneurs with corrupt Washington politicians can hardly be called dated. But something is decidedly off about the sensibility of helmer Doug Hughes's production, which stars Jim Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard and introduces Nina Arianda as the adorable bubblehead Billie Dawn. Bad enough the leads maintain a wary distance from one another and seem to distrust their own characters; they don't even seem to like the play.

Directed with an elegant touch by Doug Hughes, Arianda’s Billie Dawn is a take-charge dame, carnally aggressive and self-delighted. Clomping around in Catherine Zuber’s exuberant costumes, on John Lee Beatty’s beauty of a set, she’s a sex toy by way of Shirley Booth; this braying, unapologetic bimbo—“I’m stupid and I like it!”—may be a cousin of Jennifer Tilly’s sour Olive in Bullets Over Broadway, but she’s utterly adorable instead of appalling. This is the part that made Judy Holliday’s career, and Arianda claims it all to herself. She succeeds where many would-be Billies, such as Madeline Kahn and Melanie Griffith, have failed: This is the era of a new Dawn.

Director Doug Hughes (Doubt) doesn't try to goose the 1946 comedy with contemporary perspective. (Anyone who sat through the egregious 1993 screen remake with Melanie Griffith knows that updating this plot doesn't work.) Instead, he lets the play stand on its own idealistic, mid-century terms in its certainty that honesty and Constitutional integrity will always win out over big-money muscle and corporate and political self-interest. Even if many in the audience are likely to roll their eyes and think, 'Yeah, good luck with that,' it's pleasurable to escape into the fantasy of less cynical times.

The title of Garson Kanin’s play proves all too accurate with the new Broadway revival of Born Yesterday. This comedy about a crooked businessman in cahoots with corrupt politicians may have been written in 1946, but it seems timelier than ever in this era of tawdry Washington backroom dealings. The same can’t quite be said of its romance plotline, which has become familiar via the endless imitators that have followed it.

It’s an acting challenge that’s sunk many a decent actress, but rising star Nina Arianda nailed it. With a bow to Holliday’s sweet naiveté, Arianda makes the role her own. She gets a huge assist from costume designer Catherine Zuber, who drapes her fabulously svelte figure in elegantly ostentatious fashion.

The play is part 'Snooki Comes to Washington,' part 'Pygmalion.' Without a fabulously clever ditz in the tootsie role, however, this can be just a familiar old vehicle that confronts power ethics with the innocence of a sweet old civics lesson.

The play, which opened Sunday at the Cort Theatre and is directed with calm elegance by Doug Hughes, is riven with '40s sayings - 'Make it snappy,' 'Don't get excited,' 'So long, kid' - and yet has a very relevant, if somewhat, ham-fisted indictment of politics awash in corrupting money. It has a message campaign finance reformers would find swell.

Watching these two lock horns is so pleasurable, you want to see them again as soon as the curtain comes down.

Smoothly directed by Doug Hughes on a sumptuous hotel suite of a set by John Lee Beatty, Born Yesterday is a perfectly pleasant, perfectly pretty, perfectly tidy and perfectly forgettable three-acter. The one thing you won't forget is its Billie—who shows that there can be a lot lurking behind a vacant, pretty face.

And then there's Arianda, the play's animating ambrosia and, without a doubt, the most exciting find of the Broadway season. To my regret, I missed her in last season's Venus in Fur, but seeing her now, I understand the already radiant reputation this absurdly talented performer has quickly and justly earned. Channeling just a dram of Judy Holliday's legendary performance-her original Billie's strangled Betty Boop soprano, her ditzy-like-a-fox scene pivots-Arianda takes the physical comedy further, but never too far: Whether she's trying to outrun the train of her peignoir or pouring herself a brimming water glass of gin, she invests everything she touches with comic energy.

That's what I call a rebirth. A new face has breathed fresh life into 'Born Yesterday' at the Cort Theatre. Not that Garson Kanin's 1946 comedy was even a little tired. It is as deliciously witty and pungent as when it was born. But it takes a special actress in the key role of Billie Dawn - the dumb blond who outsmarts her junk-dealer tycoon boyfriend - to make the play more than funny and to make you fall in love. With the knockout newcomer Nina Arianda center stage, be prepared to fall hard, fast and completely. If you missed her last year as a dominatrix downtown in 'Venus in Fur,' you probably don't know her work.

Cynics may feel they're watching an animated civics lesson, but the play's plentiful humor drowns their doubts in laughter. Kanin’s potent mix of mirth and truth is expertly served by Frank Wood as the glib, self-hating attorney, Terry Beaver as the uneasy Senator up for sale and Patricia Hodges as a sporty Congressional matron. Never removing his fedora in the 'cherce' role of the junkman's cousin and slavey, Michael McGrath lopes around like a guy out of Damon Runyon.

There are very few shows in which the set earns more applause than its top-billed TV stars, but the breezy Broadway revival of the 1946 comedy Born Yesterday is one of them. John Lee Beatty has designed a radiant art deco gem of a hotel suite with gilded fixtures, glimmering onyx woodwork, ruby-red upholstery, and satiny sapphire walls. Topped off by fat swirls of curlicue chalk-white molding, it is - just as playwright Garson Kanin dictated in his stage directions - 'a masterpiece of offensive good taste.' No wonder it trumps Robert Sean Leonard's entrance. And, a few minutes later, Jim Belushi's entrance. But after Nina Arianda slinks her way down the center staircase, curtsies clumsily, and storms back up the steps, the set doesn't seem quite as glossy. As bubble-headed bottle blonde Billie Dawn - a role that won Judy Holliday an Oscar in 1950 - Arianda is giving a performance that could be called breakout, though breakout somehow seems insufficient.

There are two reasons to see the revival of Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy, “Born Yesterday,” and they’re both named Nina Arianda. This actress, who made a splash last season in the off- Broadway show “Venus in Fur,” just knocks it out of the ballpark as Billie Dawn, the curvy chorus girl who landed a big one with thuggish millionaire junk dealer Harry Brock, played by Jim Belushi.

Definitely a play of its time, 'Born Yesterday' moves at a more leisurely pace than contemporary works and is unembarrassed by its idealized political message concerning a democracy's need for an informed citizenry. I hope that won't stop younger audiences from enjoying it. Me, I had a ball.