Fools’ gold Sly Fox is Borscht Belt Ben Jonson BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Sly Fox By Larry Gelbart. Directed by Arthur Penn. Set by George Jenkins and Jesse Poleshuck. Costumes by Albert Wolsky. Lighting by Phil Monat. Sound by T. Richard Fitzgerald and Carl Casella. With Richard Dreyfuss, Eric Stoltz, Bob Dishy, René Auberjonois, Bronson Pinchot, Rachel York, Elizabeth Berkley, Professor Irwin Corey, Nick Wyman, and Peter Scolari. At the Shubert Theatre through March 7.

Ben Jonson’s Volpone, from which it borrows its premise and much of its plot, does not merit a program credit for Sly Fox. And that may be just as well, since Larry Gelbart’s San Francisco Gold Rush–set send-up of greed is a different, cuddlier, and less vicious animal than Jonson’s Elizabethan "fox" was. The 1976 work, which is trotting toward Broadway in an all-star revival helmed by veteran director Arthur Penn, mixes Borscht Belt glee and bawdiness into Jonson’s comedy of humors. The result is closer to The Producers in Hello, Dolly! clothing, but without the songs, than to Jonson’s scathing satire.

Mind you, I was less taken than some by the mischievous Sly Fox when the original production passed through Boston on its way to Broadway, with George C. Scott presenting a more Falstaffian Foxwell J. Sly, hoarder of gold and duper of fellow greediacs, than the lighter-weight Richard Dreyfuss does. Which is not to say that the play’s a geriatric dud. Gelbart (co-librettist of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) is a clever, non-stop quipster, and Sly Fox boasts many amusing lines, some — like "Never think too little of people; there’s always a little less to be thought" — encapsulating its theme. But the stagy farce, with its roster of stock characters and routine lecherous pratfalls, needs to move faster than it does at present.

Foxwell Sly, the Volpone stand-in, has done very well in the Gold Rush but thinks the best thing for his precious metal is to rest in glinting peace at the foot of his canopied bed. There he whiles away the time pretending to be ill and making fools of the carrion sycophants who come calling, each offering lavish tribute in hope of becoming the supposedly moribund Sly’s heir. In actuality, as he himself puts it, Sly has "enough health to start another man." Nevertheless, with the help of his scheme-juggling servant, Simon Able (Eric Stoltz, in a bland reading), Sly feigns hammily at death’s door while a trio of would-be legatees try to push him through it.

Although stereotypical, these chumps are more colorful than the kibitzing fox and his indentured co-conspirator. Bronson Pinchot, of Perfect Strangers fame, is Lawyer Craven, as ethically impaired as any of his breed but so wimpy he uses his briefcase as a shield. Old Broadway pro René Auberjonois is ancient poormouth Crouch, a sort of Walking Death on a death watch. And Bob Dishy, reprising his role in the original staging, is stuttering accountant Truckle, whose seething marital jealousy is so trumped by his money lust that he offers his pious if voluptuous young wife to Sly on a platter. When a couple of the plots Sly and Able devise trip over each other, the whole affair winds up in a saloon courtroom presided over by Dreyfuss doubling as a frontier judge and Professor Irwin Corey as a doddering court clerk on time delay. In Volpone, all of the lying lucre seekers get a cruel come-uppance; here, clever Sly gets not only his loot but the last word, too.

Dreyfuss’s fox lacks bite, but he’s not without quickness and a Groucho Marx sheen. ("Can you make out my wife?" asks Truckle when Sly feigns vision impairment. "I’ll certainly try," replies the bed-ridden predator. All he needs is the cigar.) Spryly trying to land the obtuse, care-giving Mrs. Truckle and banging into everything in the room but her, Dreyfuss’s Sly suggests Wilford Brimley crossed with a leprechaun. Stoltz, on the other hand, doesn’t suggest much of anything; Hector Elizondo, in the original staging, was a craftier presence.

Looking splendid in cinched, sumptuous period costumes are Rachel York, exuding plucky sangfroid as Miss Fancy, the drop-dead-gorgeous local harlot (pregnant, she says she’s narrowed the search for the father down to "the bartender at Gallagher’s and the Fifth Cavalry"), and Showgirls/Saved by the Bell vet Elizabeth Berkley as generally salivated-over sex object Mrs. Truckle. Of course, the sexism in plays of 1606 was worse than in those of 1976, so let’s not get overly exercised about it, girls.

Making the most of smaller parts are looming Nick Wyman, as childish as he is murderous (and wielding a sword that looks as if it had been taking Viagra) as Crouch’s disinherited Naval-officer son, and Peter Scolari as a Chief of Police turned on to the point of ripping his own bodice by the salacious details of the crime he’s investigating.

Sly Fox will probably pick up steam before it previews on Broadway March 12, in anticipation of an April Fools’ Day opening. But it will never be a match for its source. For all the bars of bullion at the foot of Sly’s bed, Volpone sets the gold standard.