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Theater Review
Review: Billy Crystal Carries the Tune in 'Mr. Saturday Nighttime'
In a mishmash new musical based on his 1992 pic, he charms the audition as a has-been comic reconnecting with family.
- Mr. Saturday Dark
- Broadway, Comedy , Musical
- 2 hours 35 minutes
- Open up Run
- Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St.
- 212-921-8000
On the heels of "City Slickers," just a few years later on "When Harry Met Sally," Billy Crystal was at the noon of his film stardom when he made the 1992 movie "Mr. Saturday Dark." If you spotter information technology now, you can see why it flopped, not least because Crystal was playing confronting blazon as Buddy Young Jr., a ruthlessly selfish has-been comic with a vicious streak.
At the fourth dimension, Crystal was in his 40s; for much of the film, Buddy is in his 70s. And Crystal embodied him with a centre-aged comedian's idea of that later stage of life: under old-guy makeup and then egregious that viewers couldn't maybe suspend atheism, and with the physical mannerisms of an aboriginal — like Miracle Max, Crystal's enduring elder from "The Princess Bride," only without the charm.
Iii decades later, Crystal also is in his 70s, and in the new musical one-act "Mr. Sabbatum Night," which opened on Wednesday nighttime, he slips much more naturally into Buddy's peel. As a piece of theater, the show is a scrap of a mess; the jokes, even some of the hoary ones, piece of work improve than the storytelling, and the interim styles are all over the place. Still, it makes for a diverting evening — because it will almost surely make y'all express joy, and because of how acutely tuned into the audience Crystal is.
Advertizing-libbing his way through the script, fine-tuning the funniness, he feeds off the free energy of the crowd at the Nederlander Theater. Like Buddy, who mopes around his New York apartment in a tragic cardigan, lamenting the gigs he's been reduced to taking — the morning slot at a retirement center is, later all, no comedian's dream — Crystal is utterly in his element performing alive. If y'all are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between thespian and audience, it's a pleasure to lookout man.
The musical, though, is an ungainly beast, by turns zany and sentimental. Directed by John Rando, with a mood-setting score by Jason Robert Dark-brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that goes vocally easy on its star, information technology has a book past the picture's screenwriters, Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Less cynical and more than hopeful than the movie, information technology gives u.s.a. a Buddy who is yet roughshod just not so callous, and thus a better candidate for our sympathy.
That's despite the myriad ways in which he has failed his blood brother, Stan (the immensely likable David Paymer, an Academy Honour nominee for the same office in the film), who has sacrificed his ain ambitions to be Buddy'south manager; his married woman, Elaine (Randy Graff, stymied past an near total lack of chemistry with Crystal), who has put Buddy kickoff for half a century; and their daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean, in a beautifully calibrated operation), who at 40 has been justifiably angry with her father since she was 5.
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"Mr. Saturday Night" traces Buddy's second gamble at life and fame, set creakily in movement 1 dark in 1994, when he catches the in memoriam montage on the Emmy Awards circulate and sees his own face and proper noun announced correct after John Candy's. Buddy gets booked on the "Today" show to crevice wise about the fault.
As his career wobbles toward possible resuscitation, he gradually notices that he's been a schmuck to the people who love him. "Hurt them" is the control he has always used to psych himself upward before he goes onstage, but still many audiences he'south killed, he'south done lasting harm at dwelling.
In the moving picture, the brothers' human relationship is paramount. In the musical, the father-daughter fracture comes to the fore, while Elaine — whose only solo, a fantasy about going to Tahiti, is the show's most cuttable song — is again strikingly nether-imagined. (The six-slice orchestra, which sounds terrific, is conducted by David O.)
"Mr. Saturday Night" means to be a valentine to both the bonds of family and the comedians of a foretime age — pros like Buddy, who got his big break in the 1940s at a Catskills resort and hosted a striking Tv show on Saturday nights in the '50s, before he blew a hole in his career with his loose-cannon arrogance.
The costume designers, Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser, have their silliest fun dressing Buddy'due south wacky sidekicks — Joey (Jordan Gelber), Bobby (Brian Gonzales) and Lorraine (Mylinda Hull) — for the musical'southward '50s flashbacks. A singing, dancing pack of cigarettes, anyone? (The choreography is by Ellenore Scott.)
As for Crystal'south singing, he doesn't take the range to play Fanny Brice, but he doesn't need to. He does OK. Paymer, in Stan'southward one emotional outburst set to music, kind of, sort of, most approaches singing but doesn't have those chops. Which works on a meta level, because Buddy is the brother who'due south at ease onstage.
What'southward surprising is how unpersuasive the show is when the principals play decades-younger versions of their characters — a transformation that in theater, so much less literal a medium than motion picture, can require no more than an altered demeanor. Edible bean is the simply one to tap into that simplicity.
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But most of the show unfolds in 1994. By and so, Buddy's old sidekicks are fixtures at the Friars Club, and so is he. Though if Lorraine is a fellow member, she must be a relatively recent ane; in the real world, the Friars Club of New York admitted its first female fellow member, Liza Minnelli, in 1988.
This is where nostalgia gets tricky. That boys' club territoriality is the properties to an meet at the Friars that the authors have kept largely, and unwisely, unchanged from the movie: when Buddy, expecting a powerful male agent to bring together him for lunch, is met instead by a smart immature female agent, Annie (a sunny Chasten Harmon, who has a fizzy chemistry with Crystal).
Annie, who will prove to be a godsend for Buddy, handles comics for a major agency. Still she has never heard of any of the comedy greats whose names he fires off at her in a bullying pop quiz, or even, plainly, of the Friars Guild — implausible for an industry professional, and almost incommunicable and then presently after the Friars' infamous 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg. Annie is written as ignorant just and then that Buddy tin schoolhouse her, which carries a strong whiff of dinosaur on the authors' office.
Of course, Buddy himself is a caveman. When his erstwhile pals chosen him and Elaine "Fred and Wilma" — every bit they did, affectionately, at the functioning I saw, Crystal not beingness the only i enlivening the script with variations — it was funny because information technology's truthful.
Simply Buddy does want to evolve, at least a footling. If his epiphany near his need to change seems to arrive out of nowhere, buoyed by piano and brass in a lovely, impassioned solo, we root for his redemption anyway.
This is a musical that wants its guy to get a happy ending. Despite all of the show's faults, and all of Buddy's, it turns out that so do nosotros.
Mr. Saturday Night
At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com. Running time: two hours 35 minutes.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/theater/mr-saturday-night-review.html