CELLINO v BARNES
Written by Mike B. Breen and David Rafailides
Directed by Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse
Starring Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg
Asylum NYC
Official Show Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I got to this one late, but having been hipped to it by a friend on social media, noting that it would continue running until at least the first days of December, and that it came with a pedigree of happy regional engagements before landing in New York (in 2023 and in this return engagement), I thought it worth investigating the case.
The boilerplate describes it thus: “Cellino v. Barnes is a darkly comedic rollercoaster that captures the wild partnership of notorious injury attorneys Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes, from their meteoric rise in the 90’s through their spectacular break-up in the 2010s.”
That gives you the arc.
What it doesn’t give you is the dynamic, which is familiar, but classically so. When they meet, handsome Ross Cellino (Eric William Morris) is the not-very-competent boss’s son, a layer in the firm because…well, he’s the boss’s son. But, being pretty and slick, he has a certain ability to put on a good face and hustle. So when he’s made to share an office with with super-competent, bald, less showbizzy Steve Barnes (Noah Weisberg), their combination of image and substance clicks. They have nowhere to go but up. And eventually down.
What the boilerplate also doesn’t give you is the narrative device employed by co-authors Mike B. Breen and David Rafailides (who originated the title roles onstage) which is far less familiar and way less common. Cellino and Barnes move through their career without pausing to acknowledge that one phase is over before entering the next—without even stopping the flow of conversation to mark the passage of time. It’s as if the story of their careers is one long encounter. But this gives its conflation of controlled verbal and madcap physical comedy the permission it needs to zip without segue from one to the other, under the equally fluid direction of Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse.
The “darkness” is debatable. Cellino and Barnes were real NYC presences and they may have been involved in shady stuff, but the dramatic tension is far less about how they served the legal system than about how they served each other, and the tone is more akin to the Marx Brothers than the Brothers Grimm. And in its delivery, actors Morris and Weisberg make a fine comic tag team.
Cellino v Barnes isn’t essential viewing…but it is a decent way to spend 80 intermissionless minutes which are probably cheaper than an equally long consultation. And a lot funnier. (Well…that may depend on…) No, let’s just leave it at funnier.