Entertainment

This just in: well-heeled boredom

Despite a stellar cast, including John Lithgow and Grace Gummer, there’s not much news or drama in “The Columnist.” (Joan Marcus)

Few people today remember journalist Joseph Alsop, but once upon a time he was a big deal.

Or so everybody in “The Columnist,” a new Broadway show about him, repeats over and over. That “everybody” includes the man himself, as he wasn’t shy about tooting his own horn.

So we’re told that Alsop (John Lithgow, at his most satin-robe-wearing refined) was syndicated in dozens and dozens of newspapers. That this well-heeled elitist was an influential liberal hawk and a McCarthy-hating anti-communist. That JFK dropped by his house the night of his inauguration.

In Washington, “everyone knows me, everyone fears me,” Alsop gloats, “so if you’re with me, you are guaranteed a good table at restaurants.”

As a subject, this has great potential, intermingling politics and journalism, with the Cold War as background. But David Auburn’s play — his first since the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Proof” — is as pulse-quickening as a wire dispatch about gardening controversies.

The problem is that Alsop doesn’t change much over the course of the play, and despite massaging some facts, Auburn doesn’t find any dramatic traction. Instead, he parcels out exposition through conversations — most of them between Alsop and his brother and ex-collaborator, Stewart (Boyd Gaines, impeccable as usual) — that never reach a full boil.

The one thing the playwright seems most interested in is Alsop’s homosexuality, which here becomes the key to his life — this Citizen Kane’s Rosebud.

The very first scene shows us Alsop in a hotel room with a handsome Soviet, Andrei (Brian J. Smith), during a visit to Moscow. That’s risky business in the mid-’50s, and indeed Andrei turns out to be a KGB plant.

Alsop gets out of that jam, but the encounter looms over the entire show, which takes us to 1968. It’s on our minds as we watch Alsop interact with his wife, Susan Mary (Margaret Colin), and the made-up character of stepdaughter Abigail (Grace Gummer).

It even impacts Alsop’s relationship with the New York Times’ David Halberstam (Stephen Kunken), one of the younger journalists who returned Alsop’s contempt in full.

Directed by Daniel Sullivan (“Proof,” “Good People”), the production is as good as can be. It has the kind of well-appointed polish we expect from Manhattan Theatre Club fare, with some visual grace notes — the projections of letters floating off Alsop’s columns are especially beautiful.

Lithgow has the chewiest role, but he gets top support. Colin is lovely showing the loneliness of a gay man’s wife, and Kunken’s Halberstam perfectly projects a know-it-all self-righteousness.

In the end, “The Columnist” is not much more than a lot of blah, blah. Or, since Alsop used a typewriter, clickety-clack.