Neil Simon’s comedy chestnut Plaza Suite, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick began previews last week at the Hudson Theatre. The play consists of three one acts set in the same suite in the Plaza Hotel, and the lead actors play different characters in each act. The production never opened in March of 2020 and the Hudson Theatre on Forty Fourth Street has been sitting there dark, but not unadorned with the signage and huge pictures of Broadway’s favorite couple, promising that previews would begin again on February 24th.  And here we are.

An invited dress rehearsal is the final rehearsal before paid performances begin. You have to know someone associated with the show to get in. (This is the invited part.)  It’s their last chance to screw up really good, but it is highly unlikely, as they treat this as a performance. The night we were there, everything was smooth as a fresh jar of Skippy. The air was electric with joy and anticipation. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. “Well, if it isn’t old So-and-So!” Check out tech table, still set up in the orchestra seats where the light and sound guys watch the show with the stage manager who calls the cues.

The lights went down, and the director, John Benjamin Hickey addressed the audience explaining that they may even stop and go back over something if need be.

Imagine them calling for a line!

He told us that we were the first audience in that space in almost two years. We gave ourselves a round of applause, we the Invited Ones.

In case you aren’t sure, Neil Simon was an American playwright. He wrote over thirty plays from the sixties right through to the 2000s – most of them light comedies, all of them big splashy hits on Broadway – most of them immediately adapted into films. Unless you were a child of the seventies, you may not be familiar with titles like Barefoot in the Park, Prisoner of Second Avenue and The Sunshine Boys. And let’s not forget The Odd Couple which was made into a film and then the long running TV series.

In the eighties, Simon got critical acclaim for writing slightly weightier material – three plays about his own life, starting with Brighton Beach Memoirs which starred Broderick and won him a Tony. Broderick established himself as a kind of avtar of Simon a generation ago as he played the character based on Neil Simon again in Biloxi Blues – this time the Simon character, Eugene was at boot camp during the World War two. The character grew up faster than Broderick apparently, because by the last one, Broadway Bound someone else was in the role.

His wife and co-star Sarah Jessica Parker who is largely associated with her behemoth HBO franchise, Sex and the City might not be known as a theatre actress by many, but by golly is she ever. This is by no means a review, but I cannot keep to myself how blown away I was by Parker’s comic chops and the versatility of her zany performance.

Plaza Suite is an American classic, and so are these two veteran actors. The resulting effect was like watching a pair of old friends up there on stage and I could tell I wasn’t the only one who felt the warm fuzzies. This a time of Broadway’s finally reopening and then kind of reopening again after the disheartening closures this past holiday season, and this production feels like a celebration – a post card from a glitzy time of New York theatre. Simon was a TV writer in the fifties and his vaudevillian sensibilities reflect that; with its one-liners, slamming doors and vodka stingers, Plaza Suite is of another time – imagine Mad Men as a sitcom. The play is presented pretty much as it may have been performed back when it opened in 1970 in all its innocence – I don’t recall a single curse word in the two plus hours. What comes through is a great humanity and humor of Simon’s writing and master class in comic acting.

Plaza Suite plays for a limited 16 week run.

Other big non-musical re-openings to look out for this spring:

Martin McDonagh’s The Hang Man begins previews April 8th at the Cort Theatre on 45th St.

And Tracy Lett’s The Minutes will begin performances on April 2nd at Studio 54.