Paper Boy

If an author’s affection for her characters were sufficient to create good drama, Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy would be a masterpiece. This sprawling, splashy, new Broadway infotainment arrives less than a year after the death of Ephron, who also penned iconic rom-coms like “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” It administers a sloppy wet kiss to the rough-and-tumble tabloid journalism of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s, and its heroes are the newsmen who peopled that brassy, boozy, bareknuckled world.

This was the era of crack, AIDS, Tawana Brawley and Bernhard Goetz, when The Daily News and The New York Post, and for a time Newsday, competed in shocking exposés of corruption in high and low places, conveyed in punchy prose and snappy headlines (“Headless Body in Topless Bar,” “The Lady Is a Trump”).

Indeed, it must have been grimly thrilling to cover the city in those days—a time when the Daily News reporter Mike McAlary (played by Tom Hanks) could kick off a news story by eagerly anticipating “New York’s most murderous year.” McAlary is the fortunate soul of the play’s title, portrayed here as a glad-handing everyguy from a family of Irish-American cops who simply transforms that sense of civic duty into another, more public realm. In reality what the New York tabloids did (and still do, with less reverberant effect) was to practice journalism as a kind of show business, with the occasional worthy, socially important “scoop” being the accidental byproduct of a job mostly spent Dumpster-diving for sex scandals and Mob dirt. But Ephron paints them as she saw them: as self-described “knights,” fighting their good fight for the greatest city in the world.

McAlary is a great role for Hanks, in his overdue Broadway debut, and not just because the character is essentially a nice guy with a burning if bland ambition, and whose only flaw seems to be a brand of ornery Irish stubbornness that hardens into hubris once he has a taste of power. Hanks conveys these qualities and hits the marks of McAlary’s overdetermined rise-and-fall-and-redemption journey adequately.

But it is McAlary’s very averageness that makes him a perfect role for Hanks because it is a sketchy part that needs an actor as charismatic, as magnetically human as this to keep us interested in his somewhat rote trials and tribulations. Even sporting a slight paunch and a furry Tom Selleck moustache, the 56-year-old film star has as much warmth and watchability onstage as he does on film, maybe more.

That is an even more impressive achievement than it sounds because Hanks is at the center of a swirling 14-actor ensemble, most of whom are onstage throughout, in a vigorous staging by director George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America,” “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk”) that sweeps through the show’s 15-year time span like a staged version of a quick-cut television docudrama.

It is never boring, even when it is slightly flawed: The story-theater device of having everyone, including McAlary, trade off narration and commentary like some kind of foul-mouthed Greek chorus is over-used. And Ephron’s second act stumbles into stale biographical clichés, like the sanctification of cancer, one final news scoop (the grisly Abner Louima police-abuse case) and toasts to a life well lived.

There are rich performances throughout, and Hanks’s fellow actors lend life and spirit to roles that are archetypes at best: Courtney B. Vance as a grumpy superior and grudging friend of McAlary, Richard Masur as a series of lovable blowhard bosses, Peter Gerety as a shambling, functional-alcoholic editor, Deirdre Lovejoy in a few sharp turns as hard-edged women (the only species who could thrive in such testosterone-thick environs) and Chris McDonald as a shady Irish lawyer in a Damon Runyon suit. As McAlary’s wife, Maura Tierney (“ER,” “NewsRadio”) is reassuringly grounded and does not try to wring any more out of her somewhat thankless enabler/narrator role than Ephron has provided.

And what has Ephron provided, ultimately? “Lucky Guy” has neither resonant language nor piercing insights into the news business, particularly in an age when the Internet has shaken its economic foundations and readers’ habits have changed so radically (some so radically as to not include reading at all). What the show does have is heart, personality and presence, which is not a bad résumé for a Broadway play. As a production, it may be as ephemeral as the tabloid newspapers it valorizes. It is hard to imagine a regional theater version, or really any future production. Yet “Lucky Guy” at its best is a wordy, ink-stained valentine, one writer/entertainer’s tribute to another, and one actor’s triumph. McAlary might have headlined it: “Tom Tops Nora’s Newsroom.”