Kanata’s Odd Couple Needs More Snap, Crackle, and Pop

Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple first arrived on Broadway more than half a century ago, but time has not diminished its comic potential. In chronicling what happens when the neurotic, freakishly neat Felix
Ungar moves in with his good-natured but slobbish buddy, Oscar Madison, the play becomes a springboard for hilarity. But if you look beyond the crisp one-liners and the deftly-managed comic situations — and how did that linguini end up clinging to the kitchen wall? — you
also find a good deal of sharp psychological observation about how human relationships can misfire.

Kanata Theatre’s new production has several things going for it. To begin with, there is the work of Bernie Horton and Stavros Sakiadis in the two key roles.
Horton’s Oscar is very much the likeable slob the script demands. His housekeeping may be atrocious, the bedraggled sandwiches he offers his buddies on poker night probably constitute a risk to one’s health, and you may sympathize with the ex-wife who keeps nagging him on the  phone about his maintenance payments — but there’s something endearing and disarming about this Oscar in all his fallibility.
As Felix, Sakiadis adroitly gives us all the irritating foibles that will have Oscar climbing the wall within days — the hypochondria, the obsessive neatness, the fusspot fastidiousness that even has him distributing dainty doilies to the gang at the card table during one of Oscar’s poker nights.

Felix’s maddening behaviour in Oscar’s household is nothing new. Indeed, it seems to support the script’s view that character is fate, while also underlining the evening’s central irony — that Felix is giving us a rerun of the neuroses that drove his estranged wife to desperation. However, there are too many times when this Kanata production does not successfully manage the comic payoffs that Simon’s script provides and that playgoers have a right to expect.

Directors Jim Clarke and Ron Gardner are also responsible for an excellent set credibly evoking the slight seediness of Oscar’s Riverside Drive apartment. But they seem less successful in establishing the comic rhythms needed to fulfil the play’s potential. So it’s disheartening every time one of Simon’s many funny lines passes by unnoticed.
The production does manage some effective moments when the neighbouring Pigeon sisters — engagingly portrayed by Liz Szucs and lucy  Osborne — show up for supper too late for Felix’s London broil to be edible. But the play’s opening poker scene lacks the necessary snap, crackle and pop, and seems interminable.

Yet, on an individual basis, there are some very good moments from the actors playing the poker guys: Ron Miller, Bruce Rayfuse, Ric O’Dell and Ivo Mokros are definitely giving us individual characters. The problem on opening
night was that they were not coming through collectively as an ensemble.

The bottom line: This Odd Couple does provide a lot of pleasure — yet the production itself seems curiously unfinished.
The Odd Couple continues at Kanata Theatre to April 2.