LEND ME A TENOR
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ALL IN THE TIMING
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Primary Stages’ 20th Anniversary
Revival of All in the Timing—David
Ives’ evening of short comedies built around various kinds of
wordplay—couldn’t be better cast or better directed. It’s a virtual
master class in playing and delivering comedy because each of the comic
premises is an extreme one, yet director John Rando never
encourages mugging or frenetic behavior in the quest for a laugh. Oh, to be
sure, in the sketch where three lab monkeys in a cage with three typewriters
are being monitored to see how long it’ll take them to write Hamlet, per the old bromide, he allows the screeches, hoots
and leaps of monkey behavior—but only as punctuation, setting off primal
behavior from intellectual discussion. If that sounds like a contradiction,
comedy is a soft science at best, and yes, even though the easy lob and playing
for real stakes are key components, shock effect and big gesture have their
place. And as a sketch called “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread”
demonstrates—as the title would suggest, a satire of concert/opera
musical minimalism, per Mr. Glass’s highly imitable, or at least parody-able style—there
is such a thing as purely technical comedy, committing to a concept that
escalates in absurdity but not humanistically. But then the real stake is the
joke itself; in presenting a Philip Glass moment without winking, without
editorializing, letting the total conviction be its own comment.
Too
much analysis?
Never
mind.
The
cast are Eric Clem, Carson
Elrod, Jenn Harris, Liv Rooth and Matthew Saldivar and
their show is far more instructive than my tell. Go. Laugh. Enjoy. And those of
you who would attempt comedy yourselves: Learn.
There is also expert comedy on hand at The Paper Mill Playhouse, where there’s an excellent new production of Lend Me a Tenor, an homage to the hotel-room screwball farce by Ken Ludwig, set in the 30s, about a visiting Italian tenor scheduled to make a guest appearance in Othello and all that ensues when things don’t go quite as planned. Don Stephenson has briskly directed an across-the-board splendid ensemble of terrific New York actors, about half of whom have starred on Broadway without having yet become stars in the sense of real celebrity…but because of that inspire welcome anticipation from those in the audience who know their work and a sense of revelation from those who don’t.
It’s difficult to compare this somewhat more straight-ahead rendering to the Broadway revival of two seasons back (whose stars were stars), because each represents a different calibration of the material, a different attunement to cast, and, to a certain degree, comic/technical sensibility. For one thing, few in the Broadway revival were seriously associated with musical theatre, whereas virtually everybody onstage at Paper Mill (plus, offstage, the director) is a musical theatre veteran. The commitment to comic verisimilitude and the understanding of timing and delivery are equally deft, but the fluidity is different. On Broadway, director Stanley Tucci seemed interested in adding a “humanizing” verité to the archetypes, moving the two dimensional character templates just a little closer to a third dimension; at Paper Mill, Mr. Stephenson is all about the archetypes in their most classic manifestation, so the delivery is slicker. But here’s what’s important: Both approaches are very funny and support the comedy.
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