Theatre in Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's (Cort Theatre)

	Emilia Clarke and Vito Vincent. Photo: Nathan Johnson

In 1966, David Merrick produced a musical based on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. To call it a disaster is to understate the case: The project burned through three librettists (including, of all people, Edward Albee) and God only knows how many songs before arriving in New York, where it played to catcalls and walkouts. After the fourth preview, Merrick pulled the plug, saying in a statement, "Rather than subject the drama critics and theatre-going public -- who invested $1 million in advance sales -- to an excruciatingly boring evening, I have decided to close." Neither Mary Tyler Moore nor Richard Chamberlain, who starred, returned to Broadway for a very long time.

In 2009, Sean Mathias staged a new, non-musical adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's, by the Australian playwright Samuel Adamson and starring Anna Friel, in the West End. The press was underwhelmed, to say the least: "This 'Breakfast' is as satisfying as rhinestones on toast," wrote one. "The show stutters along as a feeble hymn to Manhattan and an even feebler shadow of Capote's glittering prose style," complained another. "The ingredients may be exactly the same, but the taste is emphatically not," added a third.

Undaunted, Mathias has returned to the scene of the crime, this time getting Richard Greenberg to pen yet another theatrical Breakfast at Tiffany's, starring Emilia Clarke, of the HBO series Game of Thrones. Once again, the reviews have been memorably scathing, which is saying something in a season that has produced The Anarchist, Dead Accounts, and The Performers. Only Vito Vincent, the cat, emerged with his career prospects improved.

People, I have a modest proposal: Isn't it time to leave Breakfast at Tiffany's alone?

It's hard to explain exactly why the siren call of Capote's prose has led so many talents to exhaust themselves adapting it for the stage. I can't be the first person to notice this, but, dramatically speaking, there is nothing to adapt. At roughly 90 pages, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a plotless character study, a collection of brief, disconnected incidents focusing on Holly Golightly, a kind of stateside Sally Bowles who swans around 1940s Manhattan, living off "tips" from her male companions that are ostensibly meant to cover taxi fare and trips to the ladies' room; at $50 a pop, they go a long way toward keeping a girl in Dior. (Her only steady income is the $100-a-week fee she gets for visiting an aging mafioso in Sing Sing, carrying back his "weather reports" to his lawyer. It is a gig she will come to regret.) The nameless narrator is a virtual blank, a camera eye that trenchantly captures Holly in all her overwrought, artificial sophistication, along with the bizarre characters who follow in her wake -- the porcine, infantile playboy Rusty Trawler; the rapid-response mantrap Mag Wildwood; the motormouth Hollywood agent O.J. Benson; and Jose, the English-challenged Brazilian aristocrat. Even so, it is the author's elliptical style that keeps us reading; even as the harsh facts of Holly's carefully concealed past come tumbling out and she is enmeshed in a tabloid scandal, she remains a distant, faintly mysterious figure; underneath all her cocktail chatter is a woman forever on the run, an essentially feral creature for whom captivity means death.

Capote, who never had much luck in the theatre, seduced readers with the cadence of his voice, with its hint of southern formality and silk-encased irony. On stage, however faithfully rendered by Greenberg, Breakfast at Tiffany's suffers from the sheer absence of drama; it meanders from episode to episode, refusing to pick up any momentum as it goes. A scene barely gets going before it is time to head off to another nightclub or lobby or fire escape; it feels like half the evening is spent in semidarkness listening to bits of jazz while the panels of Derek McLane's set reconfigure themselves and new arrangements of furniture are carried on stage, while Wendall K. Harrington's projections attempt to fill the void. This results in a brittle comedy being played at the pace of an O'Neill revival. In the interest of ginning up a little drama, a half-hearted attempt is made at working up a kind of platonic romance between Holly and Fred (her nickname for the narrator), who is obviously gay and a little uneasy about it, but it never comes to much.

Would a couple of star performances have helped? Possibly, but that's not on offer here. As Fred, Cory Michael Smith makes an attractive presence and he pours on the charm, but there is so little to know about the character that it is a losing battle. (My companion, a true son of the South, had no kind words for Smith's accent.) As Holly, Clarke is beautiful in a baby-doll kind of way, but her transparently false manner and grating speaking voice prove to be fatal setbacks; it's impossible to imagine her Holly laying waste to most of the male population of Manhattan. Even worse, she is lacking anything like vulnerability. It's telling that the scene in which she pays farewell to the hillbilly medico she once married isn't touching in the least. It's even more telling that, near the end, when she has suffered a miscarriage, been named a person of interest by the police, and been abandoned by her fiancé, she still hasn't earned our sympathetic interest.

Mathias has assembled a distinguished supporting cast, all of whom are underused; still, there are nice contributions from George Wendt as a barkeep who is besotted by Holly; James Yaegashi as a photographer who, rather irrelevantly, laments the government's treatment of the sensei; Suzanne Bertish as a batty retired opera diva who is Holly's nemesis; John Rothman as a publishing executive who wouldn't mind a few hands-on editing sessions with Fred; Lee Wilkof as Berman, who tried, futilely, to make Holly a movie star; Tony Torn as Rusty, who worries that, after the war is over, Manhattan taxis will be twice as hard to get; and Murphy Guyer, genuinely touching as Doc Golightly, who married Holly but knows he can never have her. Blink and you'll miss Eddie Korbich as a friendly doctor and Paolo Montalban as Rusty's manservant.

McLane's set design must have seemed like the most sensible way of dealing with a script that is closer to a screenplay in structure, but it still has a deadly effect on the show's pacing; at least, Harrington's projections -- of the Stork Club, the Camel cigarette sign in Times Square, and a movie marquee advertising something called Sins of Youth -- evoke Manhattan in the war years. Still, the combination of these elements with Peter Kaczorowski's restrained lighting results in a series of surprisingly monochromatic looks; it's rather like sorting through a collection of sepia photographs, and it has a faintly depressing effect. Much better are the costumes, by Colleen Atwood, a noted film designer making her Broadway debut; she dresses Holly in a parade of chic outfits and provides the men with beautifully tailored suits. Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen's sound design artfully mixes original compositions with period tunes and such effects as footsteps and thunderstorms.

But surely it must be clear by now, trying to create a theatrical Breakfast at Tiffany's is a fool's errand. It is interesting to note that the only successful version of it to date is Blake Edwards' 1961 film, which, despite the racist casting of an astonishingly unfunny Mickey Rooney as the photographer Yunioshi, captures some of the wit and sadness of Capote's story. Of course, to do so, he invented an almost entirely new male lead, named Paul, and put him and Holly into a fairly conventional romantic comedy plot. But at least he ended up with a workable film. None of Holly Golightly's theatrical adaptors can make that claim.--David Barbour