Theater overview
ALL IN: COMEDY ABOUT LOVE
One hour and half-hour with no intermission. On the Hudson Theatre, 141 West forty fourth Avenue. Via Feb. 16.
The phrase “all in” in all probability summons flop-sweat recollections of placing each certainly one of your chips on the poker desk.
Effectively, on the Broadway present “All In: Comedy About Love,” the viewers does the exact same with their hard-earned cash — and loses big-time.
Ticket-buyers are being charged as a lot as $800 a pop some weeks for what’s little greater than a sedate staged studying of New Yorker cartoon captions uttered by celebrities.
Over the subsequent 2 ½ frigid months, some 14 stars — together with Jimmy Fallon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford and Hank Azaria — will lounge in armchairs clutching binders for expensive life.
However the first group, which opened Sunday on the Hudson Theatre, is John Mulaney, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Variety and Fred Armisen.
That proficient quartet performs a roster of obnoxiously wacky roles from humorist Simon Wealthy’s quick tales: delicate pirates, little one movie noir detectives, “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick and a virtually useless expertise agent who tries to signal the Grim Reaper.
Mulaney, one of the best stand-up comedian round, kicks issues off with an overlong “guy walks into a bar” joke centered round a “ten-inch pianist.” I needn’t elaborate. After which the crew shortly recites “dog missed connections” wherein canines try to reconnect after a run-in on the park.
Every cutesy bit is extra self-satisfied and twee than the subsequent. And the complete night time has the low boil of a long-winded intro that builds to nothing.
The title, by the best way, is Broadway’s greatest bait and swap.
To slap a coronary heart on the Playbill and declare that each one of those disparate situations are “About Love” is extremely deceptive. It’s solely true within the sense that, to cite Tim Rice, “every story is a love story.” “Scream 2,” when you dig a bit, can be “about love.”
Simply don’t come to the Hudson seeking to put an arm round your date. You’ll be too busy crossing them in annoyance.
The “Comedy” billing is extra subjective. Wealthy is a former “Saturday Night Live” author and Harvard grad who’s acquired approval for his revealed works. And there are some scattered laughs in “All In.” However they arrive early in scenes after which taper off as a result of a lot of the episodes are constructed across the identical repeated joke: Olde-tyme cartoons punch-lining in anachronisms.
As an illustration, in “Learning the Ropes,” a pair of “yo ho, me hearties” pirates performed by Mulaney and Armisen develop into unintentional mother and father to slightly woman (Goldsberry).
Says one in a thick seafaring brogue: “She be too young for understanding subtext!”
And earlier than that: “I knew he be being passive aggressive!”
In a while, the Grim Reaper bashfully reminisces about doing Shakespeare in class: “It wasn’t Shakespeare Shakespeare!,” Armisen’s creative Dying insists, including that his manufacturing used cell telephones.
One other, “The Big Nap,” wherein Mulaney performs an toddler investigator with the smokey voice of a child Bogart, employs the same Stewie-from-“Family Guy” technique: Tyke speaks like an grownup. That sketch, balancing observational gags with clearly dramatized occasions, is the one one which feels considerably at dwelling in a theater.
The remaining are clearly taken from books, the place amusement and true hilarity are indistiguishable and no person wants to carry for laughs. That literary, Ivy League sensibility falls flat on Broadway, irrespective of how well-known and beloved the folks studying it are.
Director Alex Timbers, the go-to man for starry particular occasions like this one, pads out the efficiency into one thing virtually resembling a play. A band referred to as the Bengsons sings chilled-out unique songs by Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields between tales. And the stage has been made to appear like a spacious espresso home by designer David Korins, albeit one the place a lukewarm latte prices $400.
Really, talking of java, right here’s an thought of what to rename this absolutely profitable enterprise: “Stars! Bucks!”
