Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) needs to prove to everyone he’s still got it in Mr. Saturday Night (photo by Matthew Murphy)
MR. SATURDAY NIGHT
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $69-$179
877-250-2929
mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com
Don’t get me started. So I’m sitting in a theater a few weeks ago, waiting for a play to begin, when I overhear the three people next to me, who are from Toronto, discussing what else they want to see while they’re in New York. “What about Mr. Saturday Night?” the oldest one asks. “Oh, I love Billy Crystal, but I’d rather see a musical,” his grown daughter says. “Who’s Billy Crystal?” her twentysomething son says, as if he could not care any less. What are they, meshugeneh?
In 1984, burgeoning superstar William Edward Crystal got his own HBO special, A Comic’s Line, in which he created Buddy Young Jr., an aging, antiquated comedian with a gruff voice and an even gruffer manner. Crystal, who played the barrier-shattering gay character Jodie Dallas on Soap from 1977 to 1981, further developed Buddy on Saturday Night Live (1985-85) and then in the 1992 film Mr. Saturday Night, which he also cowrote (with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) and directed. By then Buddy was a fully fledged, long-out-of-date Borscht Belt has-been whose outsize ego continually results in lack of success.
Crystal, who won a Tony for his 2004 one-man autobiographical show, 700 Sundays, has now turned Mr. Saturday Night into an utterly charming and fun Broadway musical — yes, Toronto friends, a musical, with plenty of shtick — reteaming with Ganz and Mandel (Splash, Parenthood, A League of Their Own), who also worked with Crystal on the two hit City Slickers flicks and the forgettable Forget Paris. In addition, David Paymer, who won an Oscar as Buddy’s long-suffering brother and agent, Stan Yankleman, in the movie, is back in the same role onstage. For the film, Crystal, who was in his early forties at the time, had to go through nearly six hours of makeup every day to play the seventy-three-year-old comedian; for the Broadway show, which runs through September 4 at the Nederlander, Crystal, now seventy-four, requires very little makeup to play the younger Young.
A onetime television star in the 1950s, Buddy has been reduced to telling lame jokes at retirement homes to less-than-enthusiastic audiences. “So, the other day, my wife says, ‘Buddy, come upstairs and make love to me.’ So I said, ‘Make up your mind — I can’t do both.’” Met with crickets, he adds, “Hey, come on. I know you’re out there — I can hear you decomposing.”
Watching the Emmy Awards in his New York City apartment, Buddy is shocked when he sees himself highlighted at the end of the in-memoriam segment that lists all the famous people who died in the previous year. “Look! They killed me!” he tells his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff). “I’m not dead, you bastards!”
But instead of wallowing in self-pity, Buddy decides he can turn the mistake into his last chance to prove to the world what he’s got before he really dies. He sings, “No more playing brises and bar mitzvahs, / Sundays at the Szechuan buffet, / All that starts changing tomorrow when I’m on Today!” After going on the morning show, Buddy is a hot commodity again, taking meetings at the Friars Club and getting a movie offer but, as flashbacks reveal, the hardheaded comedian can’t stop getting in his own way on the road to fame and fortune.
Meanwhile, he tries to reestablish a connection with his forty-year-old daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean), who has a history of drugs and arrests and is excited that she is up for a PR job. Buddy: “What’s it pay?” Susan: “Okay, you see?! I’m leaving.” Buddy: “That’s a normal question about a job. What does it pay?” Susan: “It pays ten cents a year, okay?! That’s what it pays. Ten cents a year!” Buddy: “Okay, that’s something. That’s ten cents more than last year.”
Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) keeps Jordan Gelber, Brian Gonzales, and everyone else laughing in hit Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Scott Pask’s set smoothly moves from the Youngs’ home to the Friars Club to a talk show to Young’s good old days, with costumes by Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser and video and projections by Jeff Sugg, taking us back and forth between past and present. Generously directed by Tony winner John Rando (Urinetown, On the Town), Mr. Saturday Night is great fun. Ganz, Mandel, and the endlessly irresistible Crystal — the most delightfully appealing comedian of the last fifty nears — never miss an opportunity to go for the quick laugh but without sacrificing the narrative. The show is all about Crystal; it’s unlikely to be remembered for its cast album, although three-time Tony winner Jason Robert Brown’s (Parade, The Last Five Years) music and orchestrations and Tony nominee Amanda Green’s (Hands on a Hardbody, Bring It On) lyrics are a fine match for the players.
Crystal and Paymer are not there for the singing or dancing; the more intensive numbers are left for Tony winner Graff (City of Angels, A Class Act) and Bean (Hairspray, Wicked), who are both superb. Choreographer Ellenore Scott keeps it mostly simple, not trying to give Crystal and Paymer too much tsuris. Jordan Gelber, Brian Gonzales, and Mylinda Hill excel as multiple characters, serving up, of all things, comic relief. Chasten Harmon (Hair, Les Misérables) is agent Annie Wells, who at first has no idea who Buddy Young Jr. is but is doomed to find out. I hope the same happened to the guy from Toronto. To use one of Young’s catchphrases, did you see what I did there?
Early on, Young declares, “Sure, I’m old but look, my mic hand is steady, / Still upright and I’m ready, / Do I pack away the tux and tie / and lie here growing fungus? / That’s what they want me to do!” And Crystal’s singing as much about himself as Young when he adds, “I got to hear them saying: / He’s still got it! / He’s still got it! / Balls you can’t lift with a crane.”