‘Uncle Vanya’ review: Steve Carell’s Broadway play is funny, not feeling

Theater review

UNCLE VANYA

Two hours and 30 minutes. At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th Street.

When Steve Carell emerges from behind a bench onstage at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, the crowd giggles automatically at the “Office” star.

Now playing the hapless title role in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” the revival of which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, the actor’s presence gets laughs before he does much of anything.

That’s a rare gift for any performer — think Michael Richards as Kramer on “Seinfeld.”

And my noting of that unconditional love is not meant to diminish the talented Carell, who, making his Broadway debut, turns out to be a splendid theater actor who is shrewdly cast as the bitter rural Russian.

But the audience’s three-camera sit-com chuckle does reveal this “Vanya”’s chief shortcoming straightaway. While the production has got the jokes down pat, it is quite a bit shakier when it comes to the pathos and hardship that spring from them.

Chekhov’s 1897 play, when done properly, is always funny, but the story is also a lot more than that yuks.

These depressed Slavs’ unrequited love and unrealized potential should be, simultaneously, hilarious and upsetting. And playwright Heidi Schreck’s colloquialish adaptation doesn’t go overboard with changes to tamp that down. This half-there staging, on the other hand, has us in stitches in the first half and then exhausted after intermission when the drama revs up.

Inhabiting Mimi Lien’s set that, at first, hints at a modern day camp site, Vanya and his niece Sonia’s (Alison Pill) country lives are rattled during a visit by Professor Serebryakov (Alfred Molina) — Vanya’s pretentious brother-in-law and Sonia’s dad.

Molina struts around and speaks with a rigidity that, while appropriate for his cultured character, is out of place in a revival that has Sonia dressed as a national park ranger from the Pacific Northwest.

The prof has brought along his gorgeous new young wife Yelena (Anika Noni Rose), who Vanya and the boozehound Dr. Astrov (William Jackson Harper) pine after. Sonia, meanwhile, is obsessively infatuated with the handsome doctor.

The professor, sophisticated though he may be, also has money problems and wants Vanya to sell the estate to bankroll him, proving that relatives in 1897 were much the same as relatives now.

Indeed, all of these are depressingly relatable family issues.

Sonia’s paralyzing love for Astrov, in other “Vanya”s, tends to tug our heartstrings the most as the hurt girl bemoans her plain appearance next to the glamorous Yelena. With Instagram making us feel perpetually inadequate, that speech should hit harder than ever. Yet Pill’s Sonya, who does a lot of unnatural hugging, does not fully embody Sonya’s anguish and loneliness yet.

We can understand why she’s chasing after Harper, though, whose doctor is nerdy, passionate, confident and Average Joe-y all at in one. His is the revival’s finest performance, with Carell, whose face conceals an underlying darkness, in a close second.

Whenever Rose, as Yelena, is onstage with Harper in tense two-person scenes, she rises to his formidable level. Otherwise, the actress recedes, depriving “Vanya” of an important fish-out-of-water contrast.

As the revival is led by film and TV stars, it’s naturally supported by theater vets. Jayne Houdyshell fits right in as Vanya’s hippie-looking mother, though I prefer to watch the brilliant actress take on much bigger parts than this one. And Jonathan Hadary makes a particularly hysterical Waffles, the quirky old man on the estate.

So much is individually right about Lincoln Center’s revival of “Uncle Vanya. But, like these mis-matched characters who are always at each other’s throats, they just don’t come together.