Broadway’s Born Yesterday revival is directed by Doug Hughes, who directed nothing remotely like it during the five years that he was Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. Even on Broadway, he’s better know for dramas (Wit, Doubt, Frozen, Oleanna, and even a few plays with more than one word in their titles) than comedies, though he’s been making inroads into funnier stuff with The Royal Family in 2009 and Elling (based on Ingvar Ambjornsen’s comic Norwegian novels) last year.
Born Yesterday is always a showcase for the actress playing Billie Dawn—this time it’s Nina Arianda—but I think Hughes’ ace in the hole here may be Jim Belushi. Yes, I know… but his gifts as a live performer, I happily will argue, eclipse his insipid sitcom self. Belushi was known as the Bernie Litko to beat when he co-starred in the hit Apollo Theatre production of David Mamet’s breakthrough work Sexual Perversity in Chicago in the late 1970s. (He reprised the role in the much-mangled film version, About Last Night…, and though the whole play is tamed into a shadow of its angry self, you can still sense the spark Belushi must have brought to it onstage.) I saw Jim Belushi as the Pirate King in the first national tour of Joseph Papp’s pop revision of The Pirates of Penzance; since the star of the Broadway produiction had been the much differently voiced and shaped Kevin Kline, Belushi got to make the role his own, and unleashed a swashbuckling physicality few suspected he had, and which he rarely used again until joining his brother John’s old band The Blues Brothers a couple decades later. Smart casting to make him a gangster/businessman.