In case you haven’t had your fill of Adlai Stevenson jokes, here’s Gore Vidal with a revival of The Best Man from 1960, a very slight piece of middlebrow liberal wish-fulfillment—think of a particularly overwrought episode of The West Wing produced on Broadway with James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, and Angela Lansbury.

Mr. Larroquette, fresh from a highly regarded turn in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, has had an unlikely career, with a specialty in schemers. He is most widely known for his role on television’s Night Court, but if you listen to the voiceover narration at the beginning of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’ll recognize him. Anchoring back-to-back big Broadway shows is indeed a mighty long way from playing second fiddle to Harry the Hat on a witless reincarnation of Barney Miller, but here Mr. Larroquette is asked to carry not only the performance but also the political hopes and dreams—and treacly sentimentality—of Mr. Vidal and those who admire him, of whom there remains to this day a startlingly large number. His unfortunate public descent into whatever admixture of senility and paranoia has got hold of him is a horror that no one would wish upon even so detestable a character as Gore Vidal, but it is impossible to watch The Best Manwithout seeing on the stage the first point on an arc whose end point is senescent raving about Opus Dei, the Branch Davidians, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.