Uncle Vanya review: Steve Carells Broadway play is funny, not feeling

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 (Ani...