The comedian John Mulaney joined the writing staff of “Saturday Night Live” in 2008. On his first day, he began working with Simon Rich, a boy-wonder Harvard grad who had already published two collections of short fiction. Their first sketch, “Cash for Silver,” a werewolf-accented parody of the cash-for-gold cable ads made it to the dress rehearsal, but was bumped before it aired.
Sixteen years later, over English breakfast skillets and matching double espressos in Midtown Manhattan, Mulaney, 42, and Rich, 40, could still recite every line.
“Send it! Don’t wait! Don’t ask!” Rich said excitedly.
“Send me silver right now!” Mulaney continued.
This could have gone on for a while. But they had rehearsal to get to.
Mulaney is starring in “All In: Comedy About Love,” a collection of Rich’s prose pieces lightly adapted for Broadway that opens at the Hudson Theater on Dec. 22. Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Kind and Fred Armisen join him in the inaugural cast. (Armisen, another “S.N.L.” veteran, had been cast as a boatman in “Cash for Silver.”) As the run continues, performers including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jimmy Fallon, Aidy Bryant, Nick Kroll and Tim Meadows will tap in.
The production is the brainchild of Alex Timbers (“American Utopia,” “The Pee-wee Herman Show”), a prolific Broadway director with an affinity for theater that borders other genres — the concert, the stand-up act. (He also directed “Oh, Hello on Broadway,” which starred Mulaney and Kroll.) Timbers had read all of Rich’s collections during the pandemic lockdown. During a get-to-know-you meeting in February, Timbers suggested that Rich’s short stories, many of them about relationships, marriage and heartbreak and first published in The New Yorker, could make something like a play.
He pitched it as a contemporary answer to A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” a soppy two-hander that lends itself to celebrity casting, as it’s performed with scripts in hand. Or to put it another way, this would be a “Love Letters” for people who think they’re too hip for “Love Letters.” Two days later they had a producer attached. A reading was held the next month.
Initially, Timbers and Rich culled Rich’s best stories set in the first person. There were a lot of bests. That first reading ran three and a half hours. (“Longer than ‘The Coast of Utopia,’” Timbers said in a phone interview, referring to the marathon Tom Stoppard play.) Then the pruning began, eventually resulting in a 90-minute evening that still allows for dogs, pirates, sex robots, baby detectives and the Elephant Man.
When they were “S.N.L.” writing partners, often in collaboration with Marika Sawyer, Mulaney and Rich specialized in what Mulaney called “the sheer humiliation of your human body and situation in life.” This is apparent even in more recent sketches, written for “S.N.L” episodes that Mulaney hosted, like “Toilet Death Ejector” and “Sitcom Reboot.” But the theme of “All In,” writ broadly and with occasional absurdism, is love — romantic, familial, piratical.
“I wanted something that was emotionally relatable,” Rich said. “My hope is that as superficially wacky as these stories seem, they’re universal enough that audiences can latch on to them.”
Rich, the younger son of the longtime New York Times theater critic and columnist Frank Rich, occasionally performs his own pieces, for radio and podcasts, but he doesn’t enjoy it and he jokes that he’s insufficiently handsome for anything beyond voice work. (For “All In,” he wrote a short intro to be read by one of the actors: “Dear Audience, I would read you this message myself, but I am not attractive enough even for theater.”) So performers were needed, at least four of them.
When it came to casting, the choice of a star wasn’t really a choice: It had to be Mulaney. After leaving “S.N.L.,” Rich did a stint at Pixar, and then went on to develop his own series, the FX comedy “Man Seeking Woman” and the TBS anthology show “Miracle Workers.” Mulaney forged a celebrated stand-up career. But the two remained close.
This bond was apparent — and very audible — over that breakfast this month, with Rich cheerfully copying Mulaney’s order. (He did eventually switch to Americanos, while Mulaney, seemingly immune to caffeine, kept the double espressos coming.) They interrupted each other, congratulated each other, finished each other’s sentences. Mulaney ribbed Rich, who now lives in Los Angeles, about his wholly inadequate winter wear. Rich insisted that their creative partnership endures.
“There’s a ton of your voice that has infiltrated my writing,” Rich said to Mulaney while at the restaurant.
Mulaney replied, with affection: “That’s very cool. And a real shame.”
Timbers, who also directed Mulaney’s most recent stand-up special, “Baby J,” recognized this. “Because of their collaboration over the years, there’s almost a singularity between them,” he said during a phone interview. “They grew up together creatively in this world.”
Last spring, Timbers and Rich pitched Mulaney via video call. He agreed immediately. “I mean, the idea of working with Simon and Alex is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said. Then he thought that he should probably read the script, and maybe also tell his wife, the actress Olivia Munn (they married in July), that she and their young children would need to move to New York from Los Angeles for a couple of months.
Typically it can take a show years to come to Broadway, necessitating months of rehearsal and many weeks of previews. To make it possible for stars like Mulaney to appear, Timbers has radically shortened the process. Mulaney and Rich met for this interview on the second day of rehearsal, the play would begin previews just eight days later.
This abbreviated schedule made it easier to attract in-demand performers. And Timbers anticipated that it would keep the comedy crisp. “What inhibits comedy in theater is there’s an over-prepared quality,” Timbers said. “So I think it’s going to stay fresher, more spontaneous for an audience.” In place of costumes and set pieces, the different environments would be conveyed by lighting, sound design and original illustrations by the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake. The Bengsons, an indie band with deep theatrical roots, will be onstage throughout, playing love songs from the Magnetic Fields catalog and providing sound effects.
Rich and Timbers hoped that this minimalist approach would allow the prose and the performances to shine, avoiding the cheesy or twee. Sex robots are best left to the imagination. Mulaney agreed. “I don’t think the audience will go, ‘That would have been better with an eye patch,’” he said.
At rehearsal a couple of days later, the four performers sat in comfy chairs, holding scripts. During their “S.N.L.” years, Mulaney and Rich had tended toward premise-based sketches, intellectually ambitious material that was often fairly static in performance. (This, they think, is why “Cash for Silver” was cut for time.) Characters sitting in chairs? This felt familiar.
“Full circle,” Rich joked.
Mulaney, who had arrived in his signature suit and tie, didn’t have much theater experience beyond “Oh, Hello,” but he intuited that stage acting wasn’t so different from stand-up — the words would be the same, but the mood in the room might change dramatically from night to night. And while the situations in the stories were surreal, he found them accessible.
“Being a touring comedian who suddenly has two kids is very relatable to a pirate,” he said.
At rehearsal, Timbers worked several sections, including that pirate bit. Mulaney accepted his suggestions about pacing and asked the occasional question. Should he make one moment more interior? He should. “I’m going to write that note down like Richard does,” he said, gesturing to Richard Kind, his co-star.
Behind a table near the window, Rich, still underdressed, smiled. “All In” is an evening of love stories. His friendship with Mulaney — colleagues who became comrades and stayed that way through marriage, fatherhood and various career shifts — is arguably one more.
“What a fun thing to do,” Rich said of the show. “It’s just thrilling to get to do something with friends.”
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