To Be or Not to Be

AN AFFAIR TO DISMEMBER Kristine Nielsen, right, barges in on Maxwell's tryst.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

“It’ll get a helluva laugh,” insists the shticky trouper Grunberg (Robert Dorfman), by way of justifying an ad lib for a scene in which he plays Hitler. If only it were so. Neither Grunberg’s gag, nor much else in Nick Whitby’s lusterless, slack adaptation of the 1942 film To Be or Not to Be earns a laugh, or a chuckle, or a titter. Instead, this straight-to-community-theater dud is the latest example of Manhattan Theatre Club trying to charm its subscribers with a familiar antique property. Like the Ernst Lubitsch movie that inspired it, the play tries to balance human drama, farce, social commentary, and flashes of glamour and wit. Lubitsch managed the complex waltz; this team goose-steps with all left feet.

Set in Warsaw on the eve of Hitler’s 1939 invasion, the comedy follows the romantic entanglements and backstage drama of Polish stage diva Maria Tura (Maxwell) and her narcissistic leading man/husband, Josef (Rasche). Local celebrities at the Polski Theatre, the two find their careers suspended by the Nazi occupation; soon, their very lives are thrown in danger by a starstruck young bomber pilot (Steve Kazee), who draws them into a counterespionage plot.Casey Nicholaw attempts to bolster Whitby’s stale, patchy script with transitional bits of black-and-white video, resulting in a canned and tacky production. Perhaps everyone intended To Be or Not to Be as an old-fashioned love letter to the theater during wartime, but it was returned due to insufficient postage.