CAROL KING, the woman who helped to shape the sound of America in the Sixties, and in the Seventies produced Tapestry, the quint essential album of Yankee! melancholia, is not the only convincing New Yorker in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs. Most of the cast of Red Kettle's production might pass for the real thing at a pinch, but King, who plays Kate Jerome, has a talismanic quality which certainly gets things off to a promising start.
From the mellow, reflective part of Simon's oeuvre, Brighton Beach Memoirs is more concerned with the cogs and wheels of domestic functionality than with sparklingly parried put downs. Director Peter Sheridan's choice of King as the stout heart of the playwright's impoverished pre war family lends authenticity, but Simon's cosy version of the Jewish momma offers little more than a familiar take on the benevolent dictatorship of the homemaker.
King is concerned, caring, giving, but brimming with contempt for her neighbours' low standards of domestic cleanliness. Her overcrowded house hold is headed by a humane and overworked patriarch, Jack (John Hewitt), and is stocked with a corps of bothersome but essentially well intentioned relatives. Her son, Eugene (Owen Sharpe), has ambitions to be a writer and happily narrates the evening, while his chubby brother, Stanley (Alan King), is even more bothersome and good natured than is normal for this family.
The ensemble cast hold on to their accents with white knuckle tenacity, but the production is short on punch and even a little less cuddly than it might be.
Sharpe, with whom responsibility for the pace of things often rests, does not pull together all the fragments of the insightful but childish Eugene. He darts across the stage periodically but, like many aspects of this steady rather than alluring production, he does not pick up much momentum.