The phrase “all in” probably calls to mind fail-sweat memories of placing every one of your chips on the poker table.
Well, that’s just what audiences do with their hard-earned money – and lose it big time – at the Broadway show “All In: Comedy About Love.”
Ticket buyers are being charged up to $800 a pop some weeks, for little more than a cool staging of New Yorker cartoon captions spoken by celebrities.
Over the next two and a half cold months, about 14 stars — including Jimmy Fallon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford and Hank Azaria — will be resting in armchairs, holding on to binders for dear life.
But the first group, which opened Sunday at the Hudson Theatre, is John Mulaney, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Kind and Fred Armisen.
That talented quartet plays a series of disgustingly strange roles in comedian Simon Rich’s short stories: sensitive pirates, childish film noir detectives, “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick and a nearly dead talent agent who tries to sign the Grim Reaper. Does.
Mulaney, the best stand-up comic, starts things off with a long “guy walks into the bar” joke centering on a “ten-inch pianist.” I don’t need to explain in detail. And then the crew quickly recites “Dogs Missed Connection” in which the dogs attempt to reconnect after running around in the park.
Each cutesy bit is more self-satisfied and twee than the next. And the whole night is a slow simmer of a long-winded introduction that builds to nothing.
By the way, the title is Broadway’s greatest bait and switch.
Slapping a Playbill and claiming that all these disparate scenarios are “about love” is extremely misleading. This is true only in the sense that, according to Tim Rice, “Every story is a love story.” “Scream 2” is also “about love” if you dig a little.
Just don’t come to Hudson looking to hit on your date. You will be too busy crossing them in irritation.
“Comedy” billing is more subjective. Rich is a former “Saturday Night Live” writer and Harvard graduate who has received praise for his published works. And there are a few scattered laughs in “All In.” But those scenes come early and then subside as most episodes are built around the same repeated joke: old-fashioned cartoon punch-lining in anachronism.
For example, in “Learning the Ropes”, a pair of “Yo Ho, Me Hearties” pirates, played by Mulaney and Armisen, become the accidental parents of a little girl (Goldsberry).
One of the obese seafaring crew says: “She’s too young to understand the subtext!”
And before that: “I knew he was being passive aggressive!”
Later, as the Grim Reaper shyly reminisces about making up Shakespeare in school: “It wasn’t Shakespeare Shakespeare!”, Armisen’s Artistic Death insists that cell phones were used in their production.
The second, “The Big Nap”, in which Mulaney plays an infantile investigator with the smoky voice of an infant Bogart, uses a similar Stewie-from-“Family Guy” strategy: Tyke speaks like an adult. That sketch, which clearly balances observational gags with dramatic events, is the only sketch that feels somewhat at home in the theater.
Everything else is clearly taken from the books, where entertainment and true hilarity are indistinguishable and no one needs to pause for a laugh. A literary, Ivy League sensibility fails on Broadway, no matter how famous and beloved the people reading it are.
Director Alex Timbers, known for such star-studded special events, makes the performance almost seem like a stage play. A band called the Bangsons sings cool original songs by Stephen Merritt of Magnetic Fields between stories. And the stage is designed by designer David Korins to look like a giant coffee house, as though a lukewarm latte costs $400.
Actually, speaking of Java, here’s an idea for renaming this certainly catchy venture: “Stars! Bucks!”
