Julianna Margulies’ Broadway Show Is a Cheesy Work

There’s no doubt what the new play “Left on Tenth,” which opened at the James Earl Jones Theater on Wednesday night, wants to be: a romantic, funny and heartbreaking story about a woman’s rebirth.

However, after watching Delia Ephron’s Broadway show, starring Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher, different descriptions come to mind: Sappy, slow, and awkward.

That Ephron, who co-wrote romantic comedies like “You’ve Got Mail” and “Hanging Up” with her late sister Nora, based this cliché-ridden work on the dramatic ups and downs of her own life adds another layer of discomfort.

I felt bad (horrible, actually) because I didn’t like the comedy-drama about heartbreak, illness, and the eventual triumph of this real person as much as I did. But it’s impossible to look past the mangled tone, the laughless jokes, and the emotional falsehood.

The charisma of the two protagonists cannot save the cardboard dialogue. The noble intentions make the rhythm no less clumsy. Even the cuteness of its two real dogs fails to breathe life into a show that’s ostensibly about living.

Ephron’s play begins with an identifiable setting. Delia (Margulies) is on hold with Verizon trying to fix her downed internet connection.

He lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and set designer Beowulf Boritt depicts his apartment as a wall of tall, cream-colored bookshelves. The comfortable and elegant atmosphere, appropriately, is that of a Nancy Meyers home.

The seriousness kicks in when Delia reveals why the Internet is failing: she just canceled her late husband, Jerry’s, landline, and Verizon crossed the line. He died six months ago after 33 years of marriage. She’s been lost without him.

As writers often do when their lives are thrown into chaos, Delia takes up the keyboard.

She writes a humorous essay about her telephone foibles in the newspaper, and soon a reader contacts her by email: Peter (Gallagher), a California psychiatrist, who claims he went on several dates with her when she was 18. a Jungian, a word that is said too many times on this show.

Their sweet exchange (Margulies, a terrific actress, and Gallagher sit at their desks for quite some time) turns into a long-distance relationship.

“I began to believe I was falling into my own romantic comedy,” Delia says in one of the play’s countless moments of distancing, high-stakes narration.

She has been obsessed with love since she first saw “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” as a child.

A silly transition dance (director Susan Stroman’s calling card, such as it is) meant to evoke that 1954 movie musical that should have been axed immediately.

Unfortunately, too many bad decisions have been left in the “Decima”.

Casting Gallagher was one of the few strong ones. His warm presence and resonant voice add levels to Peter that certainly aren’t evident in the silly writing. His character, save for his obsession with red pepper flakes, is robotically perfect.

And this is Delia’s new life. But her happiness is shattered when she is diagnosed with leukemia, the same cancer that killed her sister.

Peter stays by his girl’s side as the show clearly moves from desks and books to a sterile hospital room, and their relationship intensifies as she battles the illness for months.

The structure of the chemotherapy scenes (montages of worsening and improvement) is unstable. The audience should cry buckets as Delia and Peter suffer, but I’ve had more moving train rides.

It’s not for lack of trying. A real problem arises when the unconscious patient’s blood oxygen levels begin to drop, and caring Peter encourages her to keep going as the tearful song “Ship in a Bottle” plays.

Margulies is willing and does not stop as Delia deteriorates and lashes out. However, the sequences suffer from the same artificiality that the entire production shares.

Part of the problem is that Stroman is sticking to his comfort zone and has directed “Left on Tenth” as if it were a musical. It’s too concerned with transitions, adding kitschy decorations and changing wigs than with honestly portraying humans.

Delia’s struggle, therefore, is choreographed, not embodied or felt.

Aside from Delia, all the characters lack texture and are uninteresting. Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage play a Rolodex of people in his life: a British best friend in Wales, a Chai-tea-latte guy in Northern California, doctors, nurses, bartenders and more.

MacCluggage dons a different sparkly wig for almost every person (it’s practically “Rainbow High” from “Evita” with hairpieces) and works hard at accents (English, Slavic, Valley Girl). But substantially each role is exactly the same.

They are devices, not people.

Ephron’s biography might have turned out better if she had given her memoir to a different, less valuable writer with a better understanding of what works on stage. As it stands, what’s on the Jones right now is a wannabe romantic comedy that offers neither rom nor com.