ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
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By Philip Dorian
Laughter in the Title- And in the Audience
April 29, 2005
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If Laughter on the 23rd Floor is making the rounds of area community theaters, so far it's a welcome tour. Phoenix Productions staged the Neil Simon comedy in February, and Monmouth Players is getting laughs with it now. The venue is different; the cast and director is different; but the result is the same: A couple of hours of solid entertainment. The only reason not to laugh, in fact, is so you won't miss the next gag line. Most of the jokes aren't new- they're purposely not - but in the admirable Monmouth Players production, the witty, sarcastic give-and-take more than holds up.
The play was written in 1993, but its set 40 years earlier, in the heyday &endash; and the writers workroom &endash; of NBC-TV's Your Shows of Shows starring Sid Caesar. The roman a clef is based on the illustrious group of writers who penned the Caesar (and Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris) comedy sketches. Among those writers were Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, and Simon himself, who (okay, with some lesser lights) have written everything that's funny.
Primarily a tribute and a fond eulogy for the long gone days of live TV, Laughter on the 23rd floor also comments on the era's politics. Much of Caesar's satirical comedy, for all its apparent silliness, was intelligent and irreverent. No less of a comic genius than Jackie Gleason was on CBS opposite Show of Shows, but it was Caesar's digs at convention and conservatism that got caught up in the net if McCarthyism. The play touches on this, suggesting that political pressure caused the show's demise in the bland Eisenhower years.
That may or may not be the case, but it doesn't dampen the spirit of the Monmouth Players ensemble. As Lucas, the rookie writer drawn from Simon, Kevin Vislocky is excellent; he even looks a bit like the playwright. Sid Caesar's reputation has been distilled over the years to one of a blustering tyrant, but with staff loyalty and political Liberalism. Here, he's Max Prince, and all those features, as well as a sense of the truly peculiar (a Caesar characteristic), are captured by Bill Rogers, although some of his outbursts lapse into incoherence.
Milt is the master of insults, and Fortunato Seveninni issues them with a keen comic edge. Rapid fire exchanges between Keith Sampino as Val, who curses in a perfectly executed Russian accent, and John Reno as Brian, the lone Irishman in the primarily Jewish group, also hit their marks. Meena Dimian is the dapper, droll Kenny, and Bill King is Ira, the hypochondriac whose goal is to have a virus named after him.
As the lone female writer, Lipica Shah impresses, is spite of some discomfort with her character's salty language. Jennifer Lauren Scott plays Max's secretary, whose dreams of becoming a writer do not look promising.
Co-directors are listed, and for a play about co-writers, why not? Whoever did what; Rebecca Harris Flynn and Paul Renick effectively managed the traffic and kept the zingers flying. Most to the director's credit, the cast seemed as if they'd been working together in that writer's room longer than just a few hours over a couple of weekends.
This is Monmouth Players' 51st season. Half the sold out audience last Saturday looked to average about 30 years old. That bodes well for the next 51 years.