I’ve been to many Broadway productions and off Broadway as
well. Some are extravagant and some are very simple sets. Most talent is
excellent and very rarely disappoints me. I love to feel the history of the
Theater as I enter the building, thinking of all the great backers of plays and
the many, many thespians of the past that electrified the stage with their
performances, and of those that got panned, only to come back in another
production and wow those same critics.
The Lion King was an amazing production that still packs
them in, and the genius of Jim Parson’s Harvey thrilled me to no end. The feel
of old Broadway with Nice Work If You Can Get It with Mathew Broderick made me
feel upbeat and Les Miserables with its special effects will never be
forgotten. But one show, more than any other, made me realize that simplicity
in its purest form works just as well.
Recently, TLW (The Little Woman) for Christmas gave me one
of the best gifts anyone could have given me, 700 Sundays, the one man show by
Billy Crystal! It was amazing because although it was funny, and I mean very
funny: it was also poignant and filled with sobriety, tears of laughter and
tears of sorry. He held the audience in the palm of his hand.
If you are prudish and don’t like off color humor, this may
not be for you. Most of the humor was clean and decent, but then, like any good
comedian, he goes off on the deep end of hilarious with physical
representations of people in his life that I won’t go into here.
Watching him as he did his show, he took me back to the old
time jokers from the Borsch Belt who when discovered brought it all to Ed
Sullivan and made me laugh. The stage was very simply the front of a house on
Long Island where he grew up. With three sets of windows that turned into
screens that showed old movies his dad had taken and saved. These movies were a
very important part of the show, and as he said, without the movies we would be
getting only half the show!
The audience was wowed, constantly laughing loudly, and
continuously: if there IS such a thing as a laugh riot, this is it. He at one
point took tragedy and turned it into laughter. His father has died suddenly
from a heart attack, and he is beside himself with remorse, anger disbelief. An
aunt with wild hair an opinions to match, holding a perpetual cigarette in her
hand says: “He’s asleep, he’s asleep!” Billy Crystal suddenly turns to her and
says: “Wake him up and let’s get the f%#k out of this place!
At the end, he did what every good host does to his guest:
he asked us to call when we got home!
No comments:
Post a Comment