Professional
is sometimes an ambiguous word. It can mean
that one is getting paid, in respectable, legitimate circumstances, for
practicing one’s trade; it can also describe a level of excellence that you
associate with standards of taste, craft, style and polish. But as The
Last Smoker in America painfully
and definitively indicates, it doesn’t have to mean both at the same time. What
librettist-lyricist Bill Russell has
delivered here is an attenuated, puerile sketch about a housewife (Farah
Alvin) in a vaguely futuristic America in
which smoking is outlawed, trying to hold onto the vice that gives her
existence ballast and a sense of balance. The shenanigans around all this,
though. are anything but balanced and the script takes very little time to
devolve into random, sophomoric, undisciplined wackiness—also involving a
husband (John Bolton) who
flatters himself a rocker whose time will come, but writes crappy
social-protest songs; a cookie-addicted teenage son (Jake Boyd) who thinks he’s black, and an authentically black
neighbor (Natalie Venetia Belcon)
who has made Jesus her addiction. It’s the kind of comedy writing that doesn’t
recognize the distinction between goofball attributes (which can inform
character and plot complications) and goofball behavior (which flies in the
face of internal logic) and as it labors, labors, labors to ratchet up the
absurdity with increasingly bizarre departures from believability (which is at
the core of all great comedy, even the most outrageous). It’s sub-professional
on a textbook level, grating and finally exhausting. And the poor, talented
cast (for whom, I must confess, I was actively embarrassed) is working so hard.
With composer Peter Melnick in service
to this vision, he hasn’t been able to do much except cooperate in throwing
various genre song forms against the wall; and director Andy Sandberg
has gone the bigger-louder-muggier route,
a school of which I’m not a proponent, by the same token, I’m not surte what
else he might have done with this material. (And I guess it means something
that I thought about it. A lot. While I was watching the show.)
Old
Jews Telling Jokes, however,
is genuinely funny and for the most part
takes a low key approach under the direction of Marc Bruni, who
understands how often comedy isn’t a fastball, but an easy lob. Based on an
internet series which shared the title and featured exactly what the title
describes, the show features three mature veteran character actors (Lenny
Wolpe, Tod Susman, Marilyn Sokol) and two “youngies” (Audrey Lynn Weston, Bill Army) who basically tell jokes, most flavored with a degree of Yiddishkeit,
but some just delightfully “doity” (say it Brooklyn). Sometimes the
jokes are told straight up, straight out; sometimes delivered in little
illustrative sketches; but whatever the variation, no joke is overworked or
over-delivered (though, geez, please God, we could do without Marilyn Sokol’s
20 seconds of post-punch-line mugging every time she delivers one). If you’re a
veteran joke-teller (or joke listener) you know at least half the jokes and it
doesn’t matter. Classics are classics for a reason. My only small objection?
Near the end, they bring out a film-clip (until that point, a moving, rotating
flatscreen has been used mostly for subject headers and brief illustrative
animations)—they show Alan King doing his “Survived by His Wife” routine.
Strictly speaking not an old Jew telling a joke, but an old Jew killing with
o9ne of his best routines, but no matter; it’s so funny it fits the occasion.
But here’s the problem…it throws the other performers into an unfortunate
relief. In musician terms, it’s like we’ve been digging a quintet of really
terrific studio players…and then, oh, by the way, allow me to introduce you to
Mozart. Then again, to riff on a Mel Brooks aphorism, it’s good to see the
King… (And
here’s the unedited “Survived by His Wife”…)
Dogfight, just up the street a block (heading east) at the 2nd Stage Theatre is the kind of show that might give even a diehard cynic reason to believe there may be hope for American musical theatre as a mainstream genre after all. Oh, there’s no shortage of terrifically talented writers, but the opportunities they get to shine and make a living at it and have a mainstream platform are not proportionately what they once were; but the young songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have delivered a craft-literate, musically sophisticated, artistically layered score—with a sound that doesn’t confuse contemporary sensibility with contemporaneous familiarity, and a few memorable flourishes of a unique imprimatur blossoming; and librettist Peter Duchan has delivered a sweet, sensitive, economical book based on Bob Comfort’s screenplay for the 1991 film.
Set in 1993, Dogfight tells the story of a Eddie (Derek Klena), a young marine about to be deployed to Vietnam, goaded by his similarly on-the-cusp fellow Semper Fis into finding a homely date for a dance at a local San Francisco club; he with the ugliest date wins. As such stories go, of course, he finds a girl whose inner beauty belies her plain features, Rose (Lindsay Mendez) the daughter of a single-mom diner owner (Becca Ayers); and what begins as a cruel joke becomes a battle Eddie fights with himself, with peer-pressure and even with (which is to say for) Rose when he realizes that she’s worked her way into his heart. Dogfight is one of those stories that goes nowhere surprising, but for which the key to frshness is the treatment, the telling and the particulars.
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