Playwright: music by Jed Feuer, book & lyrics by Boyd Graham
At: Chicago Theatre Downstairs, 175 N. State St.
Phone: 312-902-1500; $37.50
Runs through: Aug. 20
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The new speakeasy-chic (entrance on the alley) Chicago Theatre Downstairs space will house the resurrected Shear Madness this fall—and presumably, for perpetuity. In the meantime, Jed Feuer and Boyd Graham’s irreverent two-man show has been brought in for the theatrical equivalent of a sound check in the new quarters.
The 90-minute revue is framed in the premise of a backers’ audition for a gargantuan musical extravaganza encompassing the entire history of the world. The conceit is that the two ostensible authors are performing the show’s ‘highlights’ in a tchotchke-cluttered apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—a window view identifiable worldwide—for a group of potential investors (that’s us, by the way).
As a vehicle for testing the field, The Big Bang evidences the newly-refurbished room to have adequate acoustics, some sight-line problems for the vertically challenged, requisite disability equipage, ill-placed lavatories, a sumptuous lobby with stand-up bar and a fine historical photo-exhibit of the Loop Theatre District in its heyday. As a commercial product in itself, however, the factor that will most determine the success of its seven-week run is the number of playgoers nostalgic for the kind of coarse ethnic-based Catskills humor (Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, et al.) now largely supplanted by more minority-sensitive fare.
This is not to say that Feuer and Graham’s ideas aren’t provocative (with Mrs. Gandhi and the Virgin Mary kvetching about their oddball offspring, and Native-American princesses Pocahontas and Minnehaha complaining about the singles scene), songs clever (rhyming ‘orient’ and ‘get bent’), or puns ticklish (a Sinatra-styled Attila the Hun is ‘Chairman of the Hoard’). Nor can it be said that Tony Braithwaite and Ben Dibble, assisted by phlegmatic piano man Dan Stetzel, aren’t capable zanies, scattering patter in Yiddish-mama, Life-With-Luigi, José Jimenez, Butterfly McQueen, Charlie Chan and Inspector Clouseau accents—nobody escapes caricature in this equal-opportunity spoof—with lightning speed, boundless energy and copious charm.
But if the now-exurban Noble Fool failed to find downtown audiences prepared to turn back the clock to 1961, it remains to be seen whether a return to 1931 will prove more lucrative.