moving on
down
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph Stein (book, based on the
novel by Carl Reiner), Stan Daniels (music and lyrics) Enter Laughing / Lovelace Studio Theater, at the Wallis Annenberg
Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, California. The performance Howard
Fox and I attended was a matinee on March 1, 2015.
What a vast difference 132 blocks
makes in a life, more or less, proclaims the musical, Enter Laughing—based on the novel by Carl Reiner, the play by
Joseph Stein, the film by Reiner and Stein, and the 1976 musical flop, So Long, 174th Street—concerned with the
near-impossible transition from a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx to the
symbolic center of Broadway theater, 42nd Street. Fortunately, this newly
down-sized version of the Broadway work, with music and lyrics by long-time
Reiner friend Stan Daniels, takes the whole issue with a great deal of
self-parody; a bit like director Stuart Ross’ Forever Plaid, Enter
Laughing: The Musical portrays itself as a fun-loving near amateur
production—however professional and gifted are the members of the cast and
accompanying musicians.
Kolowitz (Noah Weisberg) hasn’t a clue—or even cue—of how to act, let alone of what theater is about; all he knows
is that he loves it, and is willing to do nearly anything to pursue a career in
what imagines is a quick ascent to the top where he might live out his sexual
fantasies with fellow movie stars such as Dolores Del Rio, Jean Harlow,
and….every film goddess of late 1930s and 1940s, the affairs of which his
imaginary butler (Nick Ullett) raunchily sings (in John Gielgud-like waspish
propriety) in “The Butler’s Song.”
Once in the hands of con-man Harrison Marlowe (also Ullett) and his
nymphomaniac daughter, Angela (Amy Pietz), however, David is brought down to
earth with a crash, forced to pay to perform and asked to shell out $10 (a
fortune is those days) for a tuxedo in which to flaunt his acting failures.
Some of the most wonderful comic moments in the musical occur while David
attempts to strut the stage, leaping, flouncing, creeping, running, and
collapsing in time to his ridiculous rhythms of David’s Ronald Coleman-like
patter. He’s so bad that even Marlowe, the loquaciously rotten wordsmith behind
the ridiculous farce in which David is trapped, is left speechless; but Angela
is hot to trot with the man of her “dreams” (after all, she sings, he has a
mouth, a chin, two eyes, some toes, and a nose).
David’s promiscuous imagination, moreover, is brought down to earth with
his girlfriend next door, Wanda (Sara Niemietz), who, fearing that she may be
left in the lurch of David’s plans for himself, feeds him her own lines of love
and normality (“It’s Like” and “Being with You”). Before long David,
predictably, is confused, and, equally predictably, absolutely scared out of
his wits the moment the stage lights hits his eyes; like a deer, he blinks in
utter terror, recovering himself just enough to throw-out the play-with-a-play’s
dreadful last
It’s all been done before and far more successfully, but the
Stein-Reiner version of Enter Laughing is
so exuberantly sweet that there’s simply no way to hate it. Besides, under
Stuart Ross’ clever direction and the tinkling piano keys of the noted
accompanist Gerald Sternbach, this musical never pauses long enough to take
itself seriously. Just when you might want to cry out, “Enough already,” a
character beats you to the punch; when a song appears an inappropriate moment,
the hero signals the singer “This isn’t the right time.” So the audience has
little else to do but to sit back and laugh.
Los Angeles, March 3, 2015
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2015).
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