Hollywood Arms

May 2024 · 7 minute read

It's a showbiz truism that the roots of comic genius can be found in pain, and "Hollywood Arms" offers a grimly persuasive case study. Based on a memoir by Carol Burnett, the play depicts her desperate early years on the fringes of Hollywood, where she was raised by her loving termagant of a grandmother while her mother and father separately sank into alcoholism.

It’s a showbiz truism that the roots of comic genius can be found in pain, and “Hollywood Arms” offers a grimly persuasive case study. Based on a memoir by Carol Burnett, the play depicts her desperate early years on the fringes of Hollywood, where she was raised by her loving termagant of a grandmother while her mother and father separately sank into alcoholism.

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Sadly, this potentially poignant story, of a talented girl struggling free from the cycle of despair that consumed most of her family, has not been very skillfully dramatized. Directed with surprising stiffness by Harold Prince, it lurches and sags through an episodic 2½ hours of stage time without cohering into a sufficiently moving or consistently funny evening of theater. Perhaps the authors, Burnett and her daughter Carrie Hamilton (who died in January, shortly before the play opened at the Goodman Theater), were simply too close to the material — even if the Burnett figure’s name has been changed to Helen Melton. Whatever the cause, “Hollywood Arms” is a disappointingly awkward and lugubrious play, and even the curiosity of Burnett’s fans may not give it a very long life on Broadway.

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The play opens with a brief prologue that finds little Helen (Sara Niemietz) and her grandmother, called Nanny (Linda Lavin), stewing in Texas, where Helen’s mother, Louise (Michele Pawk), has left them while she tries to establish herself as a Hollywood correspondent. Nanny’s determined not to be left behind, so she and Helen soon pack up and land at the Hollywood Arms, where they share a one-room apartment down the hall from Louise’s.

Here the family struggles to keep food on the table. Nanny devotes much of her energy to nagging Louise for not snagging the right man, the steady Bill (Patrick Clear), and taking up with the wrong one, a two-bit actor who happens to be married. Helen’s father, Jody, is in and out of rehab (and, unfortunately for the fine Frank Wood, mostly out of the play). The young Helen is left to find her own way in life, eventually falling under the spell of showbiz, like her mother, but — unlike Louise — proving Nanny’s sour predictions of failure wrong. (Donna Lynne Champlin takes over from Niemietz in act two as the older Helen.)

Lavin, a skilled hand at the fine art of kvetching, digs into the role of Nanny with her customary professionalism, earning some big laughs for a scene in which Nanny feigns a desperate illness to ward off punishment for running a bookmaking operation — one of many failed schemes Louise and the family cook up to get by. But the role consists primarily of scolding, insulting and complaining; the character is utterly lacking in warmth and complexity.

Pawk is a fine actress with the right period look, and her performance is initially touching, as Louise attempts to re-establish a connection to her daughter while fending off the cruel slights of her mother and holding on to her dog-eared dream of making a living as a celebrity journalist. But the actress is ill-served by the play’s sudden dramaturgical jolts. In one scene, Helen helps a chipper Louise prepare for a night out with her lover Nick; a scene later, Nick’s apparently hightailed it out of her life, and the pregnant Louise has instantly turned into the bitter, shiftless alcoholic she will remain for the rest of the play. Throughout the evening, scenes feel oddly truncated or strangely shaped, even pointless; the drama never gains any emotional traction, despite its increasing pathos.

The miscast Champlin is perhaps the most unhappily used. Obviously, Carol Burnett is a one-of-a-kind talent, and it might not be wise — if it were even possible — to cast an actress with qualities that recall Burnett’s. But Champlin displays precious little of the glowing comic charisma we need to see in Helen. In the second act, Helen discovers her natural talent when she’s ordered onstage by the manager of the movie theater where she’s working as an usher. Vamping while the projector is fixed, Helen acts out the story of the movie, to the delight of the audience. As Champlin slogs through this supposedly bravura showpiece, blatantly failing to deliver it with the dazzling panache it requires, your heart goes out to her. (It may be the most poignant moment in the show, for all the wrong reasons.)

Also looking forlorn is Walt Spangler’s sepia-toned set, which seems stranded on the Cort stage, emphasizing the artifice of a fundamentally naturalistic play. Distracting, too, is Prince’s sometimes awkward staging, which requires characters to march across the front of the stage directly in front of the apartment set to knock on the door.

Indeed, neither the show’s creators nor its performers are ideally showcased here. At times the characters in “Hollywood Arms” recall more vividly realized — and funnier — figures from Burnett’s TV days. It’s clear that Burnett used memories of the fractious relationship between her mother and her grandmother in creating the characters of Eunice and Mama. There was always something painfully close to the bone in Burnett’s performance as Eunice: Playing that chronically disappointed woman with a harpy of a mother, Burnett was utterly pitiful and utterly hilarious at the same time — you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At “Hollywood Arms,” that particular dilemma never presents itself.

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Hollywood Arms

Cort Theater; 1,071 seats; $75 top

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