June 14, 2012: Comedy can be deadly. Just a few directorial misjudgments and uh-oh, sudden death: forced laughs, desperate thesps, and an aud growing surlier by the minute. Something like that has befallen the Roundabout's revival of "Harvey," Mary Chase's 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a lovable man (memorably played by James Stewart in the 1951 movie) whose best friend is a 6-foot-tall invisible rabbit. Jim Parsons aims to charm the pants off us by giving Elwood P. Dowd an air of sweet serenity. But the vacancy behind his bland facial expressions has a chilling effect.
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