Loosen your Borscht Belt, it's going to be a gag-rich evening. Barney Miller turns in his badge for showbiz in the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble's uneven but surprisingly affecting revival of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys."
Modeled on the real-life comic team of Gallagher and Shean, Willie Clark (Hal Linden) and Al Lewis (Allan Miller) are vaudeville veterans whose 43-year onstage sync has been matched only by an intense mutual dislike. When Clark's agent and nephew (Eddie Kehler) wants to reunite the duo for a variety special, the two prepare like it's a shootout at the Oy Vey Corral.
Director Jeffrey Hayden, himself a veteran of live television, paces his cast with confidence, if not always subtlety. Linden, in excellent voice at age 77, plows through the evening with an impressively grumpy vigor. Miller has less to do, but his benign shrugs are a wry study in passive aggression. Jackee Harry gives a brief, delicious turn as Linden's nurse.
Simon's play is a kind of comic steeplechase, a series of hurdles designed to elicit laughter, often regardless of story. (Doctor: "What did your father die from?" Patient: "My mother.") The jokes may be hoary, but they're bulletproof.
The production could be sharper, particularly in terms of characterization; there's a generic quality to the proceedings that keeps the show from achieving its full comic bite. Still, there's an undeniable pathos to Simon's portrait of old-timers. In a way the play, like the careers of these two men who lived for their work, is over too soon, and the last scene feels as true and bittersweet as any Chekhovian farewell.
-- Charlotte Stoudt
"The Sunshine Boys," Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions. $25-$30. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours.
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One-night stand, lifetime of change
"Nothing is enough," goes one repeated motif in "A Beautiful View." The double implications of the phrase are deliberate. In its West Coast premiere at Son of Semele theater, Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor's seriocomic trek across the intangibles of love uses slight means to count for more than their sum.
On its surface, "A Beautiful View" is an experimental exercise. With the house lights still up on the stripped-back space, a woman enters, sets a CD player at center, mimes a "Howdy" gesture and exits. A second woman appears, staring at the boom box, as the first returns with two camp chairs. It's Ionesco lite, as they exchange enigmatic comments and note our presence. Then the lights black out and the double-sided narrative begins.
