Steve Barnes (Noah Weisberg) and Ross Cellino (Eric William Morris) have quite a bromance in hilarious satire (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
CELLINO V. BARNES
Asylum NYC
123 East Twenty-Fourth St. between Lexington & Park Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 13, $59 – $129
www.cellino-v-barnes.com
asylumnyc.com
“It’s funny, when I look back, it all feels like a dream. Hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t,” Steve Barnes (Noah Weisberg) says near the end of the hilarious farce Cellino V. Barnes.
Ross Cellino (Eric William Morris) adds, “But a lot of it was real. Like, if someone in the future looked us up on Wikipedia, they’d see a lot of this was pretty . . . dead on.”
Don’t bother checking Wikipedia, because I already have, and it turns out that only the barest of bones of Cellino V. Barnes corresponds with reality. But that actually makes it all even more ridiculous and entertaining.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cellino and Barnes gained fame and fortune as a Buffalo law firm that advertised on television, the sides of buses, billboards, subways, and benches. They took unique, often highly questionable approaches to cases and became legal (or is that illegal?) loan sharks. Ross’s father had started Cellino and Likoudis in 1958; Barnes was a marine and military lawyer before hooking up with Cellino. Cellino had his healthy head of hair parted on the right side; Barnes was mostly bald except for hair behind and above his ears.
But most important, they had that jingle, which dramatically escalated their cultish popularity when they changed to a toll-free number:
“Cellino and Barnes / Injury attorneys / Call 800-888-8888.”
Running through October 13 at the Asylum NYC comedy club, the current iteration of the show — the play debuted at Union Hall in July 2018 and has undergone various changes over the years — is an intimate and fun experience. The walls leading to the theater are papered with advertisements for personal injury lawyers. Next to a urinal in the men’s room is an ad for Saul Goodman, the law-breaking lawyer character Bob Odenkirk played on Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.
Riw Rakkulchon’s small set features a desk with a laptop, a small filing cabinet, a phone with a cord, and high stacks of storage boxes. There are several rows of chairs for audience members on three sides of the stage in addition to traditional seats in the back. Cellino and Barnes are practically on top of each other throughout the show’s eighty minutes as their bromance blossoms, then falls apart.
Writers Mike B. Breen and David Rafieledes, who originated the roles back in 2018, have made Cellino a ne’er-do-well son who is not very bright when it comes to the law or life in general — he has a particular problem with fax machines — while Barnes is a know-it-all attorney with at least some kind of a conscience, until the money starts pouring in.
They first meet when Barnes is interviewing for a position at Cellino and Likoudis and Cellino catches him riffling through paperwork.
“Did you arrive to the interview twenty minutes early to infiltrate my office, steal my interview questions, and prepare answers ahead of time?” Cellino asks.
A humbled Barnes answers, “Umm. Yes. I can head out. I’m really sorry. Nice almost meeting you.”
But Cellino stops him, saying, “No. I love it. Stay. You don’t want to play by the rules? Let’s shake things up.”
That’s precisely what they do for more than twenty years as they grow rich, Cellino finds himself behind bars, and they have a very public breakup that ends up in court.
Cellino (Eric William Morris) gets serious with Barnes (Noah Weisberg) in comic romp at Asylum NYC (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Codirectors Wesley Taylor, who has starred in such Broadway musicals as Rock of Ages, The Addams Family, and SpongeBob SquarePants, and Alex Wyse, who has appeared in such Great White Way productions as Lysistrata Jones, Spring Awakening, and Good Night, Oscar, gleefully let the narrative go way over the top, occasionally too far, as the silliness reaches near-epic proportions. The show works best when the protagonists are in their suits and ties, scraping up the very bottom of the law for any money they can acquire. (The costumes are by Ricky Curie, with sound by UptownWorks, original music by Max Mueller, and lighting by Aiden Bezark.)
Morris (White Girl in Danger, The Perplexed) is terrific as Cellino, a buffoonish fraudster desperate to hear from his father, or Barnes, that he has done a “good legal job,” while Weisberg (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elf) is quirky as Barnes, who you are sure must have more ethics and morals than he displays, but maybe not. They are like an absurdist Abbott and Costello or Holmes and Yoyo, getting laughs by letting their characters hold nothing back.
Regardless of how much of Cellino V. Barnes is true, it will leave you humming that jingle — and thinking twice the next time you or a loved one might need an injury attorney.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]