Broadway Review: Matthew Broderick & Sarah Jessica Parker Check In For Tidy ‘Plaza Suite’

deadline.com:

Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite couldn’t seem better suited to the long-in-coming stage-taking of real-life couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker.

What better way for two actors who got their early starts in the theater – she as a young star of Annie, he in Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues – than a vintage Broadway comedy with multiple roles for its leading man and woman?Toss in the fact that Simon’s triptych of comic scenarios offers Parker the chance to break free of the melodramatic leanings of And Just Like That and gives Broderick a comfy stretch before his upcoming Netflix drama about the opioid crisis.A comfortable fit, no?

Maybe too comfortable. More than anything else, Plaza Suite, opening tonight at the Hudson Theatre, provides one of Broadway’s most loved couples the chance to share the stage in a slick, amiable setting that asks just enough of its stars to successfully woo an audience primed for love.

Directed by John Benjamin Hickey with a clear reverence for Simon and the theatrical era in which his 1968 comedy titillated matinee audiences, this new Plaza Suite feels mostly like an exercise in nostalgia – for a couple we’ve watched grow up, for a Broadway that demands little, and for the late playwright whose contributions to popular culture go far beyond this mid-level effort.The three acts – playlets, really – that make up Plaza Suite – are connected by place and, a bit more roughly, theme: all occur within Room 719 of the New York’s luxurious Plaza Hotel, circa 1968-69 – and each spins a tale of romance in varying stages of decay, hope or delusion.