Three Men in A Hearse

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THREE MEN ON A HORSE

AUTHORS: JOHN CECIL HOLM AND GEORGE ABBOTT

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Tony Randall and Jack Klugman play another odd couple -- but this time the laughs are like hen's teeth.

At a matinee last week, two matronly charter subscribers to Tony Randall's National Actors Theater sat debating how much longer they could be patient as the company evolves from the third-rate productions of its first season to the mostly second-rate ones now. The women never expected anything quite as glorious as the marketing ballyhoo: America's best actors performing the world's greatest plays. But as one said, "We're guinea pigs." Although they grumblingly concluded they would renew, their conversation reflected the low stature N.A.T. has attained, save for an intelligent, innovative The Seagull. This "national" troupe is like a middling regional theater with glittery casting.

Casting is surely the main draw for its season finale, a revival of the flimsy 1935 comedy Three Men on a Horse that opened last week. Randall and his Odd Couple TV partner Jack Klugman are paired for the first time ever in parts other than fussy Felix and macho Oscar -- but not very much other. Randall plays a fey, naive would-be poet who writes greeting-card verses and as a hobby handicaps horse races. Klugman plays a boozing, brawling professional bettor who discovers that Randall never picks the wrong horse and press-gangs him into partnership. In lesser roles are such familiar stage and screen faces as John Beal, Joey Faye, Ellen Greene, Julie Hagerty, Zane Lasky and Jerry Stiller. With John Tillinger, one of the ablest directors of comedy, at the helm, the show gives every promise of amusement.

Promises, it seems, are made to be broken. The event might be called Three Men in a Hearse. Randall is decades too old for his role and tries to compensate with Shirley Temple cuteness. Klugman, who has had throat surgery, speaks in a rasp that is always painful and only sometimes comprehensible from the seventh row. The play, which George Abbott adapted from John Cecil Holm's work Hobby Horses, was written for the more indulgent audiences of 58 years ago. Perhaps its cheery view of compulsive gambling, drinking until passing out, male dominance and spousal abuse seemed innocuous then; it is repellent today. The performances are even coarser. While the second half is at least less soporific than the first, there's not a moment of believable emotion or realistic behavior.

Klugman still plays tough guys as well as anyone in terms of face and gesture. But the voice is an essential instrument for an actor, and his now lacks both resonance and nuance. Some spectators ache for him, others squirm in discomfort, but few can immediately lose themselves in the character and story line. Randall, who played comedy with depth and complexity on his TV series Love, Sidney, is hammy onstage, if less excruciatingly so here than in a Feydeau farce last season.

Randall does have one exquisite moment to suggest what could have been. Reeling with a hangover, he sits at a table to take an aspirin. His fluttering hands drop it to the floor with an audible click, but he doesn't notice. He just fingers empty air into his mouth, sips water and swallows with a perfectly timed toss of his head and palpitation in his throat. Alas, one swallow does not a bummer unmake.