Old pro, new con
Dreyfuss, 'Sly Fox' sneak into Boston before hitting Broadway
Greed. It never goes out of style. It just takes on the trappings of the day.
Four hundred years ago, Ben Jonson wrote "Volpone," a satiric comedy about a schemer who feigns illness so he can fleece avaricious folk by promising to write them into his will.
In 1976, "M*A*S*H" creator Larry Gelbart adapted Jonson's play, moving it to the late 1800s San
The first "Sly Fox," starring George C. Scott and directed by famed film and theater director Arthur Penn, tried out in Boston before moving to New York. Now, after an absence of more than 25 years, "Sly Fox" comes to Boston again, opening at the Shubert tonight before heading to Broadway in mid-March.
Again Penn is directing. But this time the star is Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss, in a cast of 17.
Dreyfuss, who's played quite a few over-the-top roles in his career, seems ideal for the part. "If you look in the Yellow Pages under annoying Upper West Side characters, it would say, `See Dreyfuss, Richard.' That's my territory," he says.
Gelbart says Penn came up with the original idea of adapting "Volpone."
"He asked if I'd ever seen or read it," Gelbart says, by phone from his California home. "I practiced some lying and said I had." At the time, Gelbart ("Tootsie," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum") was in his fourth and last season as "M*A*S*H" writer and was looking for a new project.
"I wanted to avoid what happened to people who do long series," he says. "After they finish, it's like falling off a cliff. So during the last season, I was doing the adaptation of `Volpone.' "
Instead of using Jonson's 1606 play, which Gelbart felt might be dauntingly arcane, he turned to a 1920s adaptation by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who had adapted it in German and modernized the story. It was then produced in New York in 1928 by the Theater Guild. "So I was working from an English translation of a German adaptation of an English play," Gelbart says.
Penn also suggested putting it "in an American setting at a time when there was a lot of gold fever in the country," Gelbart adds. "Volpone is Italian for fox, and there's bits and pieces of an homage to the original."
Dreyfuss says his character, Foxwell J. Sly, is more foxy than evil. "As a con artist, he's always manipulating others' greed. But there's a morality from which he works. I think an attitude like Sly's always comes from a broken heart -- with people or humanity. He clearly is not the villain, he's more the avenging angel."
This will be Dreyfuss's first play on Broadway since "Death and the Maiden" in 1992. But lately he's been performing a lot, in London ("The Prisoner of Second Avenue" with Marsha Mason), off-Broadway ("The Exonerated," "Trumbo"), and regionally ("All My Sons" at the Westport Country Playhouse).
Yet if this play has a long run, as the earlier production did -- it ran 495 performances -- he will only be in it through mid-August. Dreyfuss has been cast in the Nathan Lane role in the London production of "The Producers" and is scheduled to begin rehearsals in the fall.
The cast of "Sly Fox" includes Eric Stoltz ("Mask") and Elizabeth Berkley ("Showgirls"), as well as a who's who of comic character actors, including Bob Dishy (who reprises the role that earned him a Tony nomination in the original production), Rene Auberjonois, Irwin Corey, Bronson Pinchot, and Peter Scolari.
Dishy plays Mr. Truckle, the jealous husband. "He's hysterical," says Dreyfuss. "You can't define him. He just has this Dishy-ness about him; understated and smart. He takes jealousy to a fine art."
The play, Dreyfuss says, mixes the formality of structure of Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, and the broad barbs of the Friars Club.
"It's spit-up-your-milk funny," he says. "Once I read it last summer, the first question I had was why hasn't it been revived before now?"
"Sly Fox" has been ignored by Broadway, though it's enjoyed a life in stock and amateur theater. It's returning now because Penn and lead producer Julian Schlossberg made it happen, Gelbart says.
"Schlossberg was a good friend of (George C.) Scott's," he says. "He knew the play and loved it. Arthur always thought it should be a motion picture. It was the two men's affection for it and determination" that got it onstage.
The new production is virtually the same as the '76 edition, with a few minor line changes. Gelbart says it's even more relevant today than when he wrote it during the post-Nixon era, "when the bad guys didn't always get punished."
"As we see today with corporate scandals, the bad guys still don't always get punished, but the bad women do," he adds. "Greed never goes away. In our times it just seems more rampant and brazen."
("Sly Fox" is at the Shubert Theatre tonight through March 7. Tickets available at Telecharge (800-447-7400), telecharge.com or at the box office, 265 Tremont St.)
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.
