The Power of One

By Richard Zoglin

The show opens with grainy home movies projected on the fac,ade of a suburban brick house. Out walks a grownup version of the kid in the films: Billy Crystal. For the next two hours and 20 minutes, he reminisces about that house where he grew up, learned how to hit a curveball, discovered masturbation, entertained his relatives with off-color jokes stolen from the Catskills and spent 700 Sundays with his father--the approximate number the two had together, he figures, before his dad died of a heart attack at the bowling alley when Billy was just 15.

If you're a fan of gaudy musicals and pumped-up stage dramas, Crystal's 700 Sundays might seem like a pretty stripped-down piece of theater. But then, you must not go to the theater much. Crystal's autobiographical monologue, which opened last weekend, is the hottest-selling new show of the Broadway season. And while Crystal may be alone on the stage, he's certainly not alone onstage. His is just one of five one-person shows--along with those from Whoopi Goldberg, Mario Cantone, Eve Ensler and Dame Edna--that have opened on Broadway since September.

Intriguing sign of the times or symptom of Broadway's creative poverty? Let's just say that in an era of soaring costs and a dearth of new plays with any assurance of drawing an audience, it's a perfectly logical commercial development. With only one salaried actor and minimal sets and costumes (unless you are Dame Edna), those shows are cheaper to produce than full-scale plays. "You've got a lot less risk with a one-person show and pretty much the same opportunity to make money," says Jay Larkin, an executive producer at Showtime, responsible for Cantone's show, Laugh Whore. And since many of the shows are built around stars with a presold audience, they're easier to promote. "We've got to be realistic," says Hal Luftig, the lead producer of Whoopi. "We're asking people to pay a lot of money. There's comfort in knowing what they're getting."

Comfort, alas, is the problem with too many one-person shows. Transforming a historical figure or show-biz great into the vehicle for a star turn (from Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight to Tovah Feldshuh's Golda's Balcony, which opened last season and is still running--so make that six!) seems a lazy way of making rich subject matter easy to digest--and almost guaranteeing a Tony acting nod in the bargain. Then there are the autobiographical shows, which can occasionally be dishy and inspired (Elaine Stritch at Liberty) but just as often superfluous ego trips (Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends). The real growth industry in the past few years, however, has been the puffed-up comedy monologue, from the traditional stand-up of comics like Jackie Mason, Bill Maher and Rob Becker (Defending the Caveman) to the more crafted, character-driven monologues of such performers as Lily Tomlin and John Leguizamo.

But these tours de force can start looking forced awfully quickly. Goldberg's new show is an update of her 1984 Broadway collection of character sketches that launched her career, with a couple of new voices mixed in. But the thing seems slapped together without any dramatic shape or reason, other than to let Goldberg get off some anti-Bush zingers (put in the mouth, unconvincingly, of her drugged-out street-hustler character Fontaine). Ensler has done a much better job of shaping The Good Body. But that critique of America's obsession with thinness, based on her interviews with women dissatisfied with their bodies, seems a pale follow-up to her 1996 breakthrough, The Vagina Monologues. (The producers have already announced that The Good Body will close in January.)

Stand-up comics, of course, do one-person shows every night, in clubs and concert halls, so it's no surprise that they would eventually make an assault on Broadway. The bigger question is whether they belong there. Cantone, a New York City comic and actor perhaps best known for his recurring role as Charlotte's wedding planner in Sex and the City, is a talented, high-voltage performer with a bag of good impressions (Julia Child, Sammy Davis Jr.) and a bitchy, high-camp sensibility. But despite some second-act musings about his family, including his mother's death from cancer, Laugh Whore seems a largely impersonal, oversized cable-TV special. Which the Showtime-produced show soon will be.

Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance!--the second Broadway outing for the saucy, violet-haired, spangle-spectacled matron played by Australian actor Barry Humphries--has, by contrast, no trouble filling the stage. And it's not just the piano player and the four dancers who accompany him. Humphries has built an entire show out of that old comedy-club staple of bantering with the audience. But the earnestly solicitous singsong with which Dame Edna delivers her well-practiced sucker punches ("I love the outfit you've chosen." Beat. "Is it reversible?") robs them of any meanness or condescension. Humphries is one comic who has also done the work of a playwright: he has created a character who totally envelops us in his--her--world. Go in skeptical; come out disarmed.

At one point in her show, Dame Edna drags half a dozen audience members onstage and forces them to play roles in a scene from her childhood. Crystal spends his entire show taking his own life very seriously. But that doesn't mean he has reinvented himself as a sad clown. Crystal's show is a scripted extension of his stand-up material, with lampoons of his Jewish relatives--the cranky uncles, the chain-smoking aunt in Boca Raton who regales a friend on the phone with tales of her daughter's lesbian wedding--and enough one-liners and physical business to keep his fans happy. But he's also paying tribute to his family, especially his jazz-loving father (who produced concerts by such greats as Billie Holiday), and working out some unresolved guilt (over the fight they had about chemistry homework the night his father died). Written in part with Alan Zweibel and directed by Des McAnuff, 700 Sundays doesn't escape sentimentality and is too long. But Crystal has rubbed out the line between stand-up and self-revelation. And all by yourself on Broadway, that's a gutsy thing to do. --With reporting by Deirdre van Dyk

With reporting by Deirdre van Dyk