TT: Funny like a straitjacket

Brendan Fraser has just made his Broadway debut in the American premiere of Elling, an occasion that attracted the attention of the editors of the Greater New York section of The Wall Street Journal, who asked me to review the opening for today’s paper. Here’s an excerpt.
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My preliminary expectations about Simon Bent’s “Elling” can be summed up as follows: Why would any American producer in his right mind choose to put money into a British stage play adapted from a Norwegian film based on a series of allegedly comic novels about two mentally ill men, one prim and fussy and the other loud and sloppy? What good could come of so patently misguided an investment? None whatsoever, I regret to say: “Elling” is relentlessly sentimental and comprehensively unfunny, so much so that I had to struggle to stay awake all the way to the bitter end.
I may well be underestimating the potency of Norwegian humor, for which I humbly apologize in advance. That said, the premise of “Elling,” in which the title character (Denis O’Hare) and his roommate Kjell Bjarne (Brendan Fraser) are transferred from an insane asylum to a halfway house in order to adjust to life in the outside world, strikes me as…well, not very funny. Not knowing the novels by Ingvar Ambjornsen on which “Elling” is based, I can’t say anything about their theatrical potential, but it strikes me that Mr. Bent has turned them into a rigidly commercial comedy that plays like a cross between “The Odd Couple” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” with a bit of “Waiting for Godot” thrown in to confuse the issue….
Mr. Fraser is, or can be, an accomplished film actor–he was quite good as Ian McKellen’s innocent foil in “Gods and Monsters”–but his one-dimensional performance is both unvaried and unmemorable….
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The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of Elling by going here.