You know Broadway is having a comedy moment when actors in plays as diverse as “Eureka Day,” “Cult of Love” and the runaway phenomenon known as “Oh, Mary!” are routinely drowned out by the audience’s laughter.
You might assume that Simon Rich’s Broadway debut, “All In,” whose subtitle promises “Comedy About Love,” would join this honor roll. But this new production is a slight affair that’s as easy to forget as it is to watch. Theatergoers likely to get the most mileage out of the show’s 90 minutes at the Hudson Theater are those who bust a gut reading The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section — they must exist, right? — where some of this material has appeared.
Many lines do land in “All In,” which consists of short segments based on Rich’s stories. This is a not-unexpected outcome for a former “Saturday Night Live” writer whose prose has been compared to early Woody Allen, and for the ace performers delivering his words — Fred Armisen, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Kind and John Mulaney.
This was the quartet onstage at the show I attended; the cast will rotate throughout the run. Come later and you will see different performers. Chloe Fineman, for example, will step in for Goldsberry as of Dec. 30; Lin-Manuel Miranda, Andrew Rannells and Mulaney’s “Oh, Hello” partner, Nick Kroll, start on Jan. 14. Think of it as actors playing a game of rotating armchairs. Which is fitting since that is where they spend the show, reading from scripts. (Rich’s old friend and colleague Mulaney is an outlier: He delivers the first piece standing up and appears to be mostly off book.)
Reading rather than memorizing is obviously a necessity when you have famous folks with little time for rehearsal going in and out of the production at a quick clip. Besides, the device has been effective in plays like “Love Letters,” “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” and “Pre-Existing Condition” (where there actually was a conceptual principle behind the rotating actresses playing the lead character).
Still, considering the hefty price for orchestra seats for “All In,” the bitterness of the pill — or rather the credit-card bill — stands in stark contrast to the sweetness of the show itself, which is concerned with the fact that “the most important part of life is who we share it with,” as Mulaney says near the start, reading a preface of sorts from Rich. There are as many awws as guffaws here, and the cloying sentimentality that had been simmering eventually boils over in the final segment, when a ninth-grader from 2074 (Goldsberry) presents a history paper about her great-grandfather Simon Rich and his courtship of his future wife, Kathleen.
The humor works best when Rich spins an askew perspective out of a familiar setup: pirates (Mulaney and Armisen), but they’re illiterate and need a pint-size stowaway (Goldsberry) to help them read treasure maps and become better men; a Philip Marlowe-style private detective (Mulaney), but he’s a toddler hired by his baby sister (Goldsberry) to locate her missing toy.
That particular story, “The Big Nap,” is the funniest. Rich not only expertly repurposes hard-boiled dialogue (“What kind of scratch could a baby like Zoe come up with? She wasn’t old enough to have a piggy bank. She didn’t even have pockets.”), but the actors also speak in character instead of narrating in the third person, as happens too often elsewhere. It gives them more leeway to, you know, act.
Mulaney makes the most of his (lion’s) share of the material thanks to his clipped precision, his mastery of inflection and rhythm. Yet I found myself wistfully thinking back to his own shows. It’s frustrating to see Goldsberry and Kind spend so much of their time idling (though Armisen has even less to do), especially since in addition to their comic skills they excel at chair-acting, often twisting like pretzels inside their tiny spaces. It’s also galling to see Goldsberry play two young girls and a baby (albeit a baby moll) when the men do pirates, a talent agent and Death.
The production by Alex Timbers — who also directed Mulaney’s Netflix special “Baby J,” and “Oh, Hello” on Broadway and off — tries hard to jazz up the conceit. The scenic designer David Korins has come up with a warmly inviting space whose exposed bricks are enlivened with chandeliers, like an arty loft revisited by Nancy Meyers. Between segments a combo led by the married couple the Bengsons (“The Keep Going Songs”) performs tunes by Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, Rich’s favorite band. Illustrations by the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake are projected on the back wall (Lucy Mackinnon is the video designer).
It all adds up to a pleasantly innocuous evening, but it’s also hard not to think that we’re watching a bunch of Formula 1 cars being throttled at 25 m.p.h.
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