The Imaginary Invalid review: Unfunny Molire revival on Broadway makes you scream Sacr bleu!

90 minutes, with no intermission.At the Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 W.

42nd Street.Perhaps the audience in the Todd Haimes Theatre imagined that they had laryngitis.Because the laughs certainly did not flow freely at the recent performance of Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” I sat through.For the first hour or so of the French classique, there were barely even any polite, upper-middle-class chuckles of acknowledgement.

You know the noise.Voluntary exhalations of air that say, “Yes, I am aware that was a joke.”The silence was awkward.

The Haimes is a big, chilly room.And in director Brandon J.

Dirden’s misfired Roundabout Theatre Company revival, which opened Thursday night, the actors work very, very hard to make up for it.So hard, it’s as if there is a maternity ward nurse offstage yelling, “Push! Push!”And push, they do.  Coming as a disappointing surprise, one of the most underwhelming performers of the lot is Bill Irwin as Argan, the titular hypochondriac who spends all his cash on pricey procedures and appointments that quack doctors have convinced him he urgently needs.Irwin has a strong connection to the play.

He adapted the version used in this revival with great care and affection — and, yeah, a machete.He chopped it down to 90 minutes (not as short as you think!), but kept l’action squarely in 17th century France rather than schlepping the story to the Villages in Florida, or some other contemporary retiree enclave.

Irwin is a celebrated expert in clowning and presumably knows this text in the marrow of his bones.Well, you wouldn’t realize that from his scattered Argan, who whines and reclines for most of the play in a chair at the center of the stage.The actor rambles and swallows his words as often as he scarfs down pills and his comedic timing is way off. The first few minutes, after a somewhat haphazard company dance introduction to up-tempo lute music, is Argan reading off his medical bills.

He worships “the regimen!...