If so many usually creative actors--also including Stephen deRosa and Julie Halston--are only so-so, isn't director Zaks the real culprit? He sure is. Yet he comes marvelously right in acts two and three, with the arrival of three expert comic actors: Jean Smart, Byron Jennings, and Lewis J. Stadlen. Having cast them impeccably, Zaks also knows precisely how to direct them--and, for the rest of the play, he's admirably back on form. As a result The Man Who Came to Dinner is suddenly and lastingly the whiz-bang laugh riot Kaufman and Hart intended.

Smart is Lorraine Sheldon, an actress who has acquired glamour the hard way but has learned to embody it gracefully, except when venality gets in the way and she becomes no more dignified than a clown dropping his pants.. From time to time during the course of her own phony histrionics and Whiteside's attacks on her fragile sangfroid, Lorraine feels the need to cry but can't force out any tears. It's a comic notion not mentioned in the text but made hugely funny by Smart, who lives up to her name in William Ivey Long's modish traveling suits and evening gowns. Jennings, as the Noël Coward-like Beverly Carlton, is the very essence of polish and amusement. He doesn't make a false step, and is curiously moving when he goes to the piano to play and sing "What Am I to Do," the Cole Porter's send-up of darling Noël's high-style composing that Kaufman and Hart were shrewd enough to commission.

Superlative as these two are, it's Stadlen, bringing Banjo to vibrant life, who may have already wrapped up the supporting actor Tony to be conferred next spring. Stadlen has shared the stage with Lane three times previously--in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Mizlansky-Zilinsky. Here, he gets the upper hand on his frequent partner through the sheer joy of his performing, brilliantly building Banjo into a combination of Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Jack Benny, and at least three of the Marx Brothers. (Remember: Stadlen was a gut-busting Groucho a few decades back in ). Incidentally, the Durante imitation comes into play when Stadlen sings an a cappella version of the late comedian's "Did You Ever Have the Feeling You Wanted to Go," which was not in the Kaufman-Hart script but was added to the Julius J. Epstein-Philip G. Epstein screenplay. Striding with widely swinging arms across the stage, smiling the lascivious smile of a soused Cupid, using a battery of soprano and bass voices, Stadlen reaches a new career peak with this assignment. Maybe the best word to describe his victory is: Wow!

Stadlen, Smart and Jennings not only draw attention to their own talents, but they fire up Lane as well. In no time at all, Lane is speaking in that amusing style he's patented, uttering lines in a breathless, high register as if he's so astounded at the idiocy around him that his lungs are collapsing. He shouts into the phone at operators, he gets out of his chair to do some amusing aerobics, he guffaws at Banjo's antics. When Lane does breathe, it's to indicate Whiteside's dawning humanity. What had looked like Lane's first stage misfire becomes another of his lengthening string of triumphs.

Lane, Zaks and associates make the 180-degree turn from somber to hilarious as if it were one of the wheelies Whiteside adeptly executes in his chair. It's almost possible to forget that the opening act of The Man Who Came to Dinner sits there as inertly as a man with a broken hip, since the rest of the classic comedy rolls so merrily along.