The premise, at first, appears clever, but it's not. That's about as believable as a black family in 1940's South Carolina having a summer place in Charleston and having a Jewish nanny for their children. This is totally gratuitous and this is drivel from the guy who once owned Broadway. The problem is that Neil Simon is telling the same stories over and over, but for the first time he writes a black character, and like I said, it's gratuitous and almost insulting. Get over it.
Proposals is simply downright boring and unbelievable.
Proposals biggest problem is that it doesn't know if it's a comedy or a farce, resulting in some actors giving it the comedy spin and others giving over the top performances, as if it were a farce. I really don't know what director, Erin Breen , could have done to overcome the structural flaw of the script. The answer is not much, and they don't. Without going into detail, let's just say the evening was tedious at best. Oh, there were some good things.