Theater Review: Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” Presented by the Red Bull Theater

Argan, the title character in the Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid, gives a whole different dimension to the term “health nut”—a hypochondriac whose ailments require three physicians and so many magic elixirs of dubious benefit that he’s lucky any one of these doesn’t kill him.

Fortunately, this Off-Broadway adaptation of the uproarious 1673 comedy by the French genius actor-playwright Moliere—playing at New World Stages at 340 West 50th Street through Sunday—will relieve the symptoms of any audience member who’s badly in need of laughs.

The Red Bull, in existence for roughly two decades, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, while delving into the Bard and his contemporaries through fully mounted plays as well as staged readings, will also venture elsewhere in the realm of classical theater, as, to great effect, here.

Working from a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire, Red Bull artistic director Jeffrey Hatcher has streamlined Moliere’s three-act structure to 80 minutes without an intermission, rendered in colloquial English.

At the same time, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger has put together a show that remains true to the spirit of the original, including elements that appear repeatedly in Moliere’s work: a screen where characters hide and eavesdrop; doors opened and slammed as characters chase each other on and off stage; a saucy maid far smarter than her deluded employer; a daughter and her boyfriend who must convince her father not to give her away to a loathsome suitor; and, presiding over the madcap household, a paterfamilias not only cuckolded (and about to be swindled) by his much younger wife, but in the grip of an absolutely unreasoning obsession.

Moliere used his last farce to poke at a longtime bugaboo: quack doctors. (He suffered his fatal illness mid-performance in the lead role, leaving many in his audience, much like Redd Foxx, thinking that coughing blood was part of his act.)

Creating a massive opening for such medical mountebanks is the aging Argan (with veteran stage, film, and TV comic actor Mark Linn-Baker as masterful with dialogue as with demanding physical comedy). So convinced is Argan that lack of feeling in his buttocks foretells worsening health that he requires the strenuous ministrations of a trio of doctors (all played, hilariously, by Arnie Burton, who deftly differentiates each).

Argan’s plan: marry his daughter Angelique to a doctor so he’ll have free healthcare for the rest of his life. The problem is that the lucky fellow (played with panache by Russell Daniels), the son of one of Argan’s current physicians, is an unprepossessing specimen—dressed in a child’s sailor uniform barely able to contain his porky physique, and even less skilled (and far more squeamish) than his father about the healing arts.

The cast not only maintains a breathless pace but obviously delights in feeding off each other’s energy while playing this assembly of deceivers, both well-intentioned and, in the case of the doctors and lawyer on hand, out-and-out charlatans—sometimes even breaking character by dissolving in laughter onstage at another character’s antics. In addition to the above-named actors, also worthy of note are:

*Sarah Stiles, stealing scene after scene with merely a sly grin as the servant Toinette;

*John Yi, lending musical accompaniment as well as generating chuckles as Angelique’s handsome but dim-witted suitor, Cleante; and,

*Emily Swallow as Argan’s gold-digging second wife.

In the enormous enemy dispenser brandished in this farce, properties designer Laura Page Russell has fashioned the New York theater world’s most explosive weapon of mass eruption.

I have favorably reviewed other Red Bull productions before, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. But none were as rollicking from start to finish as this one.

I was thrilled to watch this theater group for the first time since the pandemic. Argan is the type who today would be gulled by Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, not to mention new medications approved by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s FDA.

Rather than sink into dismay over the fools and frauds who are multiplying in the current political environment, the Red Bull has adeptly supplied appropriate therapy in the form of Moliere’s boisterous mockery.

Flashback, April 1925: Noel Coward’s ‘Fallen Angels’ Makes Controversial West End Debut

Noel Coward (pictured), enjoying his first burst of popularity, engaged the attention of London’s West End audiences in April 1925 with another frothy comedy, Fallen Angels—only this time he also attracted the notice of the national censorship arm.

In the prior two years, the playwright had made a splash with his West End debut, The Vortex. But it was his hit follow-up, Hay Fever, that led Anthony Prinsep of the Globe Theatre to reconsider and dust off an earlier effort, Fallen Angels.

The subject matter of this latter effort—dialogue among two female friends about premarital sex—raised the eyebrows of British censor Lord Cromer of the Lord Chamberlain office, which since 1737 had been tasked with approving all plays before they opened. 

This same year was a particularly active one for Lord Cromer, as he went on to veto Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms and an English translation of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In the end, Lord Cromer ruled that Coward’s “light and unreal and humorous” approach to the material rendered it harmless. But he recommended deleted passages in order to make the saucy lines “less objectionable” to those “who disapprove of quite unnecessary frankness of expression among women.”

The Lord Chancellor notwithstanding, one female playgoer did indeed find Coward’s irreverent send-up of two friends who find they have bedded the same man to be “objectionable.” Her outburst interrupting the second act earned her immediate ejection from the building—and the production the kind of welcome notoriety that so often gooses the box office.

The play’s producers quickly capitalized on what purported to be its naughty subject matter. “IT IS NOT A PLAY FOR CHILDREN,” they announced the following year in a flyer for a Preston, England production. “It depicts the ultra-modern young women of today, with truth and realism. They may not be lovable characters, but they are essentially amusing, and decidedly daring.”

Fallen Angels premiered at the Globe Theatre (now called the Gielgud Theatre) midway through the 1920s, a decade that, as Bruce Bawer’s September 2023 article in The New Criterion observed, “belonged to Noël Coward,” as “the quintessential exemplar of Britain’s upscale youth.” Within two months of Fallen Angels’ debut, four of his plays would be running simultaneously in London, a mark rivaled only by Somerset Maugham.

The latter, older and more established in the theater than Coward, had distressed Tallulah Bankhead so much by rejecting her for the role of prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain that, as she later related in her autobiography, she had put on the character’s costume, "gulped down 20 aspirins" and lay down after scribbling "It ain't gonna rain no more."

The day after this setback, Bankhead received a call from her friend Coward, who was experiencing a crisis of his own. The actress playing Julia, he explained, had withdrawn from the production with practically no time to spare before the opening. Could Tallulah fill in and learn the lines in the four days before the premiere?

“Four days!” the flamboyant actress drawled. “Dahling, I can do it in four hours.” Their friendship and professional association would continue for several more decades, most famously in the 1948 Broadway revival of Coward’s Private Lives.

Fallen Angels lasted a little over a month when it came to Broadway in 1928, then was revived with somewhat more success—239 performances—when it was revived on the Great White Way in 1956 with future TV stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., William Windom, and Nancy Walker.

Though seen more frequently in the UK, the scandal once associated with it has faded with the decades, and it has not entered the charmed circle of Coward plays like its more successful immediate follow-up, Hay Fever, not to mention Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, or Blithe Spirit.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I noticed on the Web that the Roundabout Theatre has announced it for its Spring 2026 schedule. I am not one of those people predisposed to dismiss a vintage play as “dated,” and the principals promoted for the Roundabout show—stars Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara, and director Scott Ellis—boost one’s confidence that they will wring every laugh out of Coward’s insult- and innuendo-laden dialogue.

This Day in Theater History (Moliere, Stricken Mid-Performance, Dies Offstage)

Feb. 17, 1673—Maybe he was tempting fate, but, just as Moliere was mocking doctors in the latest satire he'd written for his troupe, The Imaginary Invalid, he began to cough and gasp towards the end of the comedy's fourth performance. 

The audience, at first stunned, fell into familiar laughter when they saw the French actor, director, theater administrator, and playwright grinning. But he had been coughing up blood and had to be carried home in a sedan chair.

Moliere frantically urged his company to summon his wife and a priest to hear his last confession, but neither arrived in time before he died, at age 50, succumbing to a seizure brought on by tuberculosis.

Why didn’t Moliere call for a doctor as he expired? I can think of four possibilities:

1) He knew his case was hopeless at this point, as he’d been suffering from TB for several years, refusing to let it curtail his creative activity;

2)    2) He thought doctors were incompetent and/or useless;

3)    3)  He dreaded physicians (an attitude not entirely excluding Possibility #2, given the state of 17^th-century medicine); and

4)    4)  Dialogue he’d written for himself in his new farce, a broad wink to the audience, might have revealed how he thought men of medicine would react to his emergency: “Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: ‘Go on, drop dead!’”

But the choice of the two people that Moliere (the pseudonym adopted by Jean Baptiste Poquelin) did want at his side echoed the two major controversies of his life and career. 

There was a two-decade difference in age between him and wife Armande, at a time when significant age gaps between spouses were even more snickered at than they are now. 

Adding fuel to the wisecracks aimed at him: the rumor that Armande was either the sister of his former mistress or her daughter by Moliere.

(Remember: With no such thing as exercise regimens, understanding of diets, or regular checkups, a 50-year-old man in 1673 was more like 60—at least.)

Moliere was fully aware of what a buffoon he looked like to his critics. The School for Wives (1662), written not long after his marriage, featured the playwright himself as a foolhardy bachelor bound and determined to wed a pretty young thing. 

And in The Misanthrope, the title character is nearly undone not just by his judgmental temperament but by his jealousy of the younger, flirtatious woman he loves.

As for a priest to hear his confession: the Roman Catholic Church came closer to wreaking vengeance on him than the medical profession did. Though Moliere had been careful in Tartuffe and Don Juan to show that he despised religious hypocrisy rather than the practice of religion itself, the Church saw these plays as direct attacks on the institution. 

When he died, his widow had to plead directly with King Louis XIV (someone that Moliere had been careful not to offend) to allow a Christian burial—an appeal only granted on the condition that the ceremony be done with no pomp.

Today, nobody but Moliere scholars knows the names of his critics. But in the three and a half centuries after his death, his work continues to entertain audiences and influence members of the profession for which he literally gave his life. 

Ever since I saw a local production of Don Juan—and a 1970s PBS telecast of Tartuffe starring Donald Moffat and Tammy Grimes—I have marveled at Moliere's slashing wit, as well as his sprightly dialogue rendered in Alexandrine rhymes (and translated superbly by American poet Richard Wilbur). 

I could not let this post go without discussing a bit more about the most dramatic exit he ever made. Have any other entertainers died under similar circumstances?

Well, yes. Interestingly enough, quite a few opera singers died onstage. (I suppose that the enormous vocal demands of their work—and, sometimes, the singers' big frames—left them vulnerable.)

But there have also been several notable cases of other comic actors who, like Moliere, were struck down during a performance:

• Redd Foxx, the example that sprang immediately to my mind, died of a heart attack in October 1991 during rehearsals for the sitcom The Royal Family—and cast and crew, remembering his many feigned attacks two decades before on Sanford and Son, did not immediately suspect anything was amiss this time;
• Dick Shawn, perhaps best remembered as the hippie actor "LSD" in Mel Brooks' film The Producers, suffered a fatal heart attack during a performance at the University of California, San Diego's Mandeville Hall; and 
• Al Kelly, a vaudeville comedian, died in the audience in 1966 right after delivering a Friar's Club roast of Joe E. Lewis.

(For more details on Moliere's death, see this fascinating 2013 post by French literature scholar and novelist Maya Slater, on the Oxford University Press blog.)

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on an Actor Being Rejected for an Upcoming Tour)

Gary Essendine: “Beryl Willard is extremely competent. Beryl Willard has been extremely competent, man and boy, for forty years. In addition to her extreme competence, she has contrived, with uncanny skill, to sustain a spotless reputation for being the most paralysing, epoch-making, monumental, world-shattering, God-awful bore that ever drew breath...I will explain one thing further - it is this. No prayer, no bribe, no threat, no power, human or divine, would induce me to go to Africa with Beryl Willard. I wouldn't go as far as Wimbledon with Beryl Willard.”

Liz: “What he's trying to say is that he doesn't care for Beryl Willard.” —English playwright, actor, director, and singer-songwriter Noel Coward (1899-1973), Present Laughter (1939)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Arrested Development,’ on Why People Really Hate Hospitals)

Lucille Bluth [played by Jessica Walter]: “I'll be in the hospital bar.”

Michael Bluth [played by Jason Bateman]: “Uh, you know there isn't a hospital bar, Mother.”

Lucille: “Well, this is why people hate hospitals.” —Arrested Development, Season 1, Episode 4, "Key Decisions," original air date Nov. 23, 2003, teleplay by Brad Copeland, directed by Anthony Russo

Theater Review: Lindsey Ferrentino's ‘Andy and the Orphans,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

The Roundabout Theatre Co. concluded an astonishing run of a new play last week. Even just in terms of the script, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino and director Scott Ellis collaborated on an often funny, more often moving road piece of theater in Amy and the Orphans. 

But they also spotlighted a different kind of non-traditional casting—a female and male actor afflicted with Down Syndrome, taking turns in the same key role—that, one hopes, will bring greater opportunity for this mentally challenged group.

Throughout most of the run at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, Jamie Brewer ("American Horror Story") played Amy, an adult with Down Syndrome, in Amy and the Orphans. Toward the end of the run, however, understudy Edward Barbanell, during Wednesday and Saturday matinees, took over the role, with the production then titled Andy and the Orphans for these occasions.

It was at one of those Saturday matinees that I saw Barbanell. Brewer must have been very fine indeed in the role, because Barbanell excelled as an emotionally complicated character who would exact every bit of any actor’s skill.

The plot unites bicoastally and mentally separated siblings Jacob (Mark Blum) and Maggie (Debra Monk), brought back to their Long Island for the funeral of their father (which itself had followed closely on the death of their mother). 

Before putting their father to rest, they must break the news to their younger sibling Andy, whom they will transport from his group home, “Caring Communities," for the services. Matters become even more complicated when they are joined by Andy’s pregnant legal guardian, Kathy (Vanessa Aspillaga), with wisecracks about her own situations and with pointed reminders that she is far more in touch with the daily needs of their neglected brother than they are.

Flashbacks also depict the now-deceased parents, Bobby (Josh McDermitt, “The Walking Dead”) and Sarah (Diane Davis), as they weigh what to do about infant Andy. Their decision—to commit him to Willowbrook, a New York school for the mentally disabled—left many area residents of a certain age (including this viewer) in the audience with searing memories of headlines about a now-notorious institution.

Although Blum, Monk, and Aspillaga were frequently amusing, McDermitt and Davis were consistently searing as their husband and wife characters went back and forth on a decision that would not only affect the course of their own relationship but the lives of their children.

Roundabout mainstay Scott Ellis kept the play moving swiftly through its 90 minutes without intermission.

The play’s Amy was based on the playwright’s real-life adult Amy, who had the misfortune to live “when medical professionals told my grandparents they had just given birth to a 'Mongolian idiot' who would never learn to read or write.”

In the post-show “talkback” with the audience, Barbanell related how he made his case for taking on the role by reciting the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Natural preparation, it seems to be, with “To be or not to be” also being about how—even if—to endure a world that seems stacked against you at every turn, as his Andy is in the play.

The Laura Pels Theatre has served as a launching pad over the last several years for several new small-scale, but worthy productions by fledging playwrights, such as Meghan Kennedy’s Napoli, Brooklyn, Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match, Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love. Steven Levenson’s If I Forget, and Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews. Andy (or Amy) and the Orphans expands on that tradition, bringing to the surface a problem from America’s past in its mistreatment of its most vulnerable citizens.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Harold Lloyd, Silent ‘Man on the Clock’)

Apr. 20, 1893— Harold Lloyd, a comparatively neglected “third genius” in a silent-comedy triumvirate with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was born in a humble, three-room home in Burchard, Neb. It was a far cry from the 44-room mansion on a 16-acre Beverly Hills estate that he built from his earnings as the progenitor of “daredevil comedy.”

You won’t find a Lloyd character making a cute appearance in a TV commercial, as Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” did for IBM in the 1980s. Nor will you see many retrospectives of his work, as Keaton has enjoyed courtesy of worshipful film historians.

It’s a surprise, then, to learn that Lloyd made more films and more money at his height than these now more celebrated contemporaries. And though he never achieved the same level of success in the sound era that he did in the silent period, he took to the talkies with a greater eagerness than Chaplin and Keaton.

Unlike those two stars, Lloyd learned the art of comedy not through vaudeville but on movie sets. Though he started as an extra with Universal Studios and worked for a while with Mack Sennett, his principal early association was with Hal Roach (later, the producer of the films of Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang comedies). 

There he tried several knockoffs of Chaplin’s tramp—“Just Nuts,” “Willie Work,” and “Lonesome Luke”—before, feeling creatively stagnant, he stumbled on the infinitely adaptable figure, though with his own distinct look and style, that would make him famous: “The Boy Next Door” or, more familiarly, the “Glasses Character.”

Benjamin Wright astutely noted three years ago that the transformative effect of Lloyd’s famous horn rims: “For Lloyd, the glasses make him seem common and they also challenge the general perception that men with glasses are more serious and astute, a perception that perhaps helps Lloyd elicit greater laughs.” Or, as the actor marveled: “At a cost of 75 cents they provide a trademark recognized instantly wherever pictures are shown."

Not long after he developed his distinctive persona, however, Lloyd’s career almost ended before it had a chance to really take off. An accident, incurred while posing for a photograph with what he thought was a fake bomb, cost him a thumb and a forefinger. Thereafter he concealed the damage by wearing flesh-colored prosthetic gloves and hiding his right hand whenever photographed.

Perhaps the most famous shot in silent-film history came in Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923), when his character dangled frightening but determinedly from a clock tower high above a heavily-trafficked street. The scene was shot so realistically that many viewers (including critic Walter Kerr, in his otherwise authoritative The Silent Clowns) believed that it was actual. 

But Lloyd’s own description, years after the fact, had already divulged, amid its laborious explanation, that an elaborate sequence—i.e., technical tricks—was required to convey the impression:

“We did the final scenes of that climb first. We didn't know what we were going to have for the beginning of it. We hadn't made up the opening and after we found that we had, in our opinion, a very, very good thrill sequence, something that was going to be popular and bring in a few shekels, we went back and figured out what we would do for a beginning, and then worked on up to what we already had.”

The whole thing involved building small three- and four-story buildings on hills, followed by clever editing—and, finally, the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Why has Lloyd’s reputation stayed largely in decline while Chaplin and Keaton continue to be remembered? Several explanations, all with a certain amount of plausibility, have been offered over the years:

*Critics wedded to the “auteur” theory do not adequately credit Lloyd as the principal creative force of his films. Lloyd did not particularly care about receiving credits as a director or writer for any of his movies—after all, as head of the company that produced his films, he was intimately involved in the careful shaping of gags. But, in the eyes of some critics, the lack of these additional critics led his overall creative contribution to his movies to be overlooked.

*The limitations of early TV, with their small screens and plethora of commercials, so annoyed Lloyd that he refused use of his films to be shown, thereby limiting exposure to a potential younger generation of fans. As owner of his work, Lloyd feared loss of control in the then-new medium. Not just smaller screens, but incorrect projection speeds and a multitude of commercials ensured that viewers would not be able to appreciate his work under the same conditions as a filmgoer in the 1920s. Eventually he was prevailed upon to release two compilations in the early 1960s: Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy and Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life.

*Much of Lloyd’s early work was lost in a fire on his estate. In August 1943, a nitrate fire and explosion destroyed many of the films that Lloyd had bought from their distributor five years before. The loss mortified Lloyd, an early film preservationist. Because many of the lost movies were made before 1919, there has been less chance to analyze the development of his art over time.

*The ever-optimistic nature of Lloyd’s “glasses” character has not been universally embraced by critics who favor the darker undertones in Chaplin and Keaton. “Harold Lloyd—he’s surely the most underrated [comedian] of them all,” observed Orson Welles, his friend and fellow magician. “The intellectuals don’t like the Harold Lloyd character—that middle-class, middle-American, all-American college boy. There’s no obvious poetry to it.” In contrast, Chaplin's critique of capitalism was front and center in Modern Times, and Keaton's triumphs offer onscreen occur as much in spite of as because of his actions--an almost existentialist conception of human beings' ability to shape change.

Lloyd's breathless energy manifested itself not just in the comedies he created at his peak but in the hobbies he pursued afterward: philanthropy, chess, bowling, microscopy, painting, and especially 3-D photography (in his last two decades he took close to 300,000 stereo slides).

"If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter,” critic-novelist James Agee wrote in his influential 1949 essay on silent comedy, “Comedy's Greatest Era,” “Lloyd was not a great comedian. If plain laughter is any criterion — and it is a healthy counter-balance to the other — few people have equalled him, and nobody has ever beaten him."

Most filmgoers don’t even realize that much of what they are watching today originated nearly 100 years ago with Lloyd. Those frenetic Jackie Chan films requiring breathtaking athleticism and comic skill from its star? That, surely, is from the Lloyd template. The romantic comedy involving an average guy winning out against overwhelming odds by sheer manic energy? Part of the Lloyd brand. The names of the titular heroes of the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber? Harold and Lloyd—duh!!!!

Even Lloyd’s many possessions have shown up on the big screen. Paramount borrowed his Rolls Royce to serve as William Holden’s vehicle of pleasure in Sabrina, and his mansion would be used in The Godfather (1972), Westworld (1973), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Commando (1985).

“The more trouble you get a man into, the more comedy you get out of him,” Lloyd once noted. In 1953, four years after the failure of his last sound film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Hollywood bestowed an honorary Oscar on the “good citizen” and “beloved Freshman" who had “permanently dislocated the funny bone of America,” Harold Lloyd.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ on Sheldon and ‘The Toad of Truth’)

Howard Wolowitz (played by Simon Helberg): “Sheldon, what the hell are you doing?”

Dr. Sheldon Cooper (played by Jim Parsons): “The same thing I’ve been doing for three days. Trying to figure out why electrons behave as if they have no mass when travelling through a graphene sheet.”

Bernadette Rostenkowski (played by Melissa Rauch): “With marbles?”

Sheldon: “Well, I needed something bigger than peas, now, didn’t I?”

Bernadette: “Sheldon, when was the last time you got any sleep?”

Sheldon: “I don’t know, two, three days. Not important. I don’t need sleep, I need answers. I need to determine where in this swamp of unbalanced formulas squatteth the toad of truth.”

Penny (played by Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting): “Toad of truth? Is that a physics thing?”

Leonard Hofstadter (played by Johnny Galecki): “No, that’s a crazy thing.” — The Big Bang Theory, Season 3, Episode 14, “The Einstein Approximation,” original air date Feb. 1, 2010, teleplay by Chuck Lorre, Steven Molaro and Eric Kaplan, directed by Mark Cendrowski