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The British version of The Graduate, too, seems to miss much of the film's sense of time and place, as well as its very American comic rhythms. The scenes that try to duplicate the movie (Benjamin's awkwardness at the hotel, for instance) fall flat. Those that depart from it (the climactic scenes at Elaine's wedding) go totally awry. To streamline the action for the stage, Johnson makes elisions that simply don't play. Mrs. Robinson now tries to seduce Benjamin not in her house with her husband gone but in his bedroom with a party going on downstairs--and the door wide open!
Biggs is likable, if a little bland, as Benjamin. But he has to wade through Johnson's clumsy dialogue, which makes Benjamin's pre-Vietnam anomie far too explicit. ("Those people are grotesque," he complains of his parents' friends. "I want simple, honest people.") And maybe only a Brit could have envisioned Kathleen Turner, with her foghorn voice and faux Continental accent, as a bored Southern California housewife. Turner last played Tallulah Bankhead onstage, and doesn't seem to have paused for a cigarette in between. Her come-on to Benjamin is so overbearing and unsexy that it's a miracle the kid doesn't flee the room in horror. Forget Mrs. Robinson; paging Norma Desmond.
Yet even before its New York City opening last week, The Graduate had racked up the biggest advance sale of any nonmusical in Broadway history. The British, even when they look like theatrical tourists, may yet have something to teach Americans: how to offend the critics and still have a big fat hit.