Harvey

Studio 54, New York

(212) 719-1300

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hallucinations are no doubt less common at Studio 54 today than they were in the 1970s, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. But even though the famed nightclub long ago became a legitimate theater, strange visions haven’t disappeared altogether. Take Harvey—a 6-foot-tall rabbit who “spreads both exasperation and enchantment among all who encounter him.” He’s the companion of Elwood P. Dowd, a lovable eccentric played by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons. The fact that Harvey is invisible makes him no less of a pivotal character. “By no means” is the play he’s featured in “a work of great profundity.” But its charm remains infectious.

Alas, this “oddly sluggish production” saps some of that appeal, said Thom Geier in Entertainment Weekly. It “lurches from scene to scene when it should be bunny-hopping briskly along.” Beyond that, some of the supporting players are miscast. Jessica Hecht appears particularly uneasy in the role of Elwood’s sister Veta, who tries to get her brother committed to a mental hospital but ends up being institutionalized herself. Parsons, though, is a revelation. He “commands the stage in a surprisingly offhanded way” without making his Elwood a carbon copy of Jimmy Stewart’s 1950 film version. Yet while Parsons makes the central character “refreshingly modern,” the same cannot be said of this relic of a play.

Harvey is indeed a product of its time, said Howard Shapiro in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1944, when it debuted, it was “an antidote to the stress, loss, and violence of World War II.” Today it may seem, in places, surprisingly radical. It “mercilessly ridicules psychiatry,” for instance, by suggesting that those who regularly take vacations from reality might be the sanest among us. Near the story’s end, Veta is given the option of having Elwood injected with a miracle drug to erase his delusions. Though that might make Harvey seem socially relevant today, “I’d like to think that it won’t.” This is a comedy about a giant imaginary rabbit. “We might get into trouble by digging too deep.”