The Nap Broadway Reviews

The production (staged with an ear for comic timing and an eye for physical bits by Daniel Sullivan, who is best known for directing contemporary American dramas) is great fun with thick English accents and foul language. Just a few weeks following the death of Neil Simon, it is nice to see that an old-fashioned, silly-but-smart nonmusical comedy can still find a place on Broadway.

Little surprises lead up to a very big one in Richard Bean's new comedy 'The Nap,' which had its American premiere Thursday at MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. This review won't disclose the Big Reveal, which is right up there with the one in David Mamet's 'House of Cards.' However, it's the many little surprises of the first act that most intrigue and delight.

You don't need to know much of anything about billiards to get hooked into this witty play from prolific playwright Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors), which came to Broadway after a well-received 2016 run in the U.K.

'The Nap' is less frenetically funny than 'One Man,' and more modest in scale. But it shares with its predecessor a fondness for the subterfuges and archetypes of classic farce, which Mr. Bean translates fluently into modern-day terms.

Director Dan Sullivan's production is fine enough, though the pacing can slack at times when the funnier characters are offstage and the budding romance between Dylan and Eleanor takes over. The Nap may play better in Bean's home country, where audiences members are more likely to have a familiarity with the sport, but even on this shore it's a genial diversion with many good laughs.

The best performances are from Schnetzer and Lind, whose characters try to navigate some sort of coupling in the middle of all the insanity. Most of the other actors have created types: they get laughs and they're fun, but you never feel them breathe the same air. This American premiere also is underpaced: it's written to move with the speed of the black careening toward triumph, to ricochet with the excitement of the break, but instead you get too many pockets of air. Until the balls fly; then you want to cheer snooker's first Broadway moment.

Two games are performed live with an actual snooker whiz, Ahmed Aly Elsayed, as Dylan's competitor. There's in-the-moment drama as the audience follows on large overhead projections as the game is played, with tensions broken by the laughs derived from the hush-speaking commentators. The second game brings even more fraught nerves as its conclusion is entirely up to the skill of Schnetzer - with an alternative ending if things don't go exactly as planned. But either way, the game - and this improbable comedy - ends with a solid shot in the corner pocket.

Happily, Bean has a sense for balance, and doesn't let his farce linger too long over romance. He soon gets back to the table: '[Play] with the nap,' Dylan tells us, 'the ball will run straight with the natural line. [Play] against the nap, the ball can deviate and drift...' For Bean, the nap is a straight line to a good joke. He knows his game.

Sorry, but American actors can't do regional English accents. OK, maybe Meryl Streep and a handful of others. But too few of the people on stage in The Nap, in which many of the best lines acquire their flavor from colorful Sheffield vernacular. Effortful delivery is just one issue with the wheezy direction of Daniel Sullivan, whose forte is definitely not this kind of snappy, suspenseful comedy, in which timing is everything.

The Nap, Broadway's latest laugh from London, tries to fool us and sometimes does, though not in ways playwright Richard Bean might have intended. Teased with the appealing prospect of an evening of Martin McDonagh-lite, we're quickly handed a cartoon con job.

A sprinkling of cute one-liners and two live snooker sequences in the second act-with improvised commentary-provide moments of relief from the forced plotting and even more forced romance, which converge in an inane finale. Can the current mania for British imports please take a pause? Not every play is meant to travel.