Theatre in Review: Born Yesterday (Cort Theatre) If you haven't made the acquaintance of Nina Arianda, what are you waiting for? Having made a stunning, out-of-left-field Off Broadway debut last season in Venus in Furs, she now makes an equally impressive Broadway bow as Billie Dawn, the blissfully ignorant blonde bombshell who occupies the heart of Born Yesterday. Having leapt from the chorus of Anything Goes into the love nest of Harry Brock, a millionaire who deals in two commodities - scrap metal and US Senators -- Billie is content to spend her days flipping through magazines, downing booze by the tumbler, and walloping the daylights out of Harry in one gin game after another. Having been brought to Washington, DC by Harry on his latest influence-purchasing expedition, her brassy manners terrify the locals - but, as she says, "I'm stupid and I like it." So what if she's bored most of the time, or if Harry takes an occasional poke at her - she's sitting pretty, isn't she? Maybe not. Harry, worried that Billie needs to have her rough edges smoothed down, hires Paul Verrall, a journalist, to be her tutor in the ways of Washington. Big mistake -- not only are Billie and Paul instantly attracted to each other, under his guidance, she delves into the great books, starts perusing the newspaper, listens to classical music, and -- horror of horrors -- begins to think for herself. ("She's stupid, in a refined way," remarks the new Billie about a senator's wife who pretends to have read David Copperfield.) Whether she's reeling of her half-dozen lines from Anything Goes marshalling her cards to annihilate Harry at gin, or halting an argument with Paul to inquire, balefully, why he thinks she is 30 (she is, in fact, 29), Arianda is a solid-gold charmer. Even better is the moment when, confronted with an unfamiliar insult, she rushes to the dictionary to find out how badly she has been maligned. Best of all, she lets us see the dawning light in Billie's brain, as she begins to understand that the only mistress she should be is of her own fate. There's a lot more to like in Doug Hughes' revival, including Jim Belushi's Harry Brock, his chummy manner never really hiding his thuggish soul, and Robert Sean Leonard's Paul, whose charmingly deadpan manner often leaves both Billie and Harry scratching their heads, trying to figure out if they've insulted or not. It's good that all three stars are in top form, because Born Yesterday is looking a little frailer than it once did, and it needs a strong boost of energy. It utilizes the three-act structure so popular in the '40s, but the first act bogs down in exposition; the laughs don't really begin until just before the act curtain, when Harry and Billie retire to the card table. After that, the fun is pretty constant, but there's still the matter of author Garson Kanin's idealism about Washington politics; written in 1946, in a burst of postwar optimism, Born Yesterday now seems pretty naïve in the way it treats influence-peddling as an aberration, an evil to be rooted out as quickly as possible. Today, when it seems more like the way of the world, Kanin's take on it seems like a bad case of wishful thinking. If creeps like Harry could be defeated as easily as he is here, we'd be living in the new Utopia. Still, Born Yesterday comes in a deluxe package, beginning with John Lee Beatty's Federal-style hotel suite, an over-decorated black-and-white duplex, complete with a spiral staircase at center stage. Adding valuable touches of period feeling are Catherine Zuber's costumes; the designer has a great deal of fun with Billie's vulgar outfits, and she also provides some sterling examples of men's tailoring. The lighting, by Peter Kaczorowski, and the original music and sound design by David van Tieghem are both fine. A nicely detailed, if slightly sleepy, revival of a play that is showing its age, Born Yesterday is nevertheless worth a look for Arianda's performance -- which, by the way, is nothing like the work of Judy Holliday, Broadway's first Billie, as preserved in the classic film. It's a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a most promising career. You'll be able to say you saw her when.--David Barbour 
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