Do you ever have one of those dreams in which someone is telling jokes so thigh-slappingly funny that you want desperately to remember them when you wake up? Then you wake up, remember them -- and they're not funny. They're so far from funny, in fact, that you wonder what you were thinking. The only solace is that you didn't embarrass yourself by laughing at them in real life.

Watching Scott Elliott's revival of Neil Simon's 1963 comedy Barefoot in the Park, a virtually plotless confection about the post-honeymoon days of a middle-class urban couple, is like that humiliating dawn's-early-light experience. But the initial 1,530-performance run of Simon's breakthrough opus, so delectably dire[...]