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The Cavendish clan in George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s 1927 play The Royal Family—an affectionate parody of the quirks, missteps, and bad habits of the Barrymore dynasty—are bohemian in the true sense of the word, before it was used to describe any old celebrity in a Rachel Zoe caftan. And yet the various Cavendishes’ fondness for sleeping past noon, indulging in lusty liaisons, and spending their dollars into the negative figures doesn’t eclipse the fact that they’re basically working people, plying their trade onstage and onscreen.

The director of this Manhattan Theatre Club production, Doug Hughes (who’s also behind the recently opened revival of Oleanna), understands that this may be a pointed comedy, but it’s not a cruel one. He loves these willful crackpots, as he needs to. What’s missing from the show is buoyancy. There’s a dogged quality to too many of the performances, as if the actors had dutifully seized the material by the scruff of the neck instead of sidling up to it flirtatiously. When Jan Maxwell as Julie Cavendish, an aging prima donna who’s facing a midlife crisis, reads a breathlessly written telegram aloud, she adds too much punctuation, destroying the deliriously nonsensical effect of the hasty, jumbled words as Kaufman and Ferber wrote them. Everyone here is working hard, but most of them are making it look too much like work.

There are exceptions: Reg Rogers, as the roguish Tony Cavendish—clearly modeled on John Barrymore—has just the right boozy twinkle in his eye. He strides through the show, in an assortment of louche silk dressing gowns and shaggy fur coats, with liquid precision. Maxwell, too, comes through in the clutch; in the finale, some of her varnished meticulousness dissolves, and she cuts straight to the play’s half-melancholy, half-optimistic heart. And Rosemary Harris, as the dowager matriarch Fanny, may wear the heaviest costumes—she’s draped in exotic, old-fashioned (by twenties standards) velvets—but her performance is the springiest, the most fleet, in the show. Her lines have the texture and glow of South Sea pearls; if any voice could reflect light, it would be this one. — Stephanie Zacharek