Maybe you love Barbra Streisand. Or maybe you love making fun of Barbra Streisand. Or maybe both. An added bonus would be if you used to watch Ugly Betty and are familiar with the actor Michael Urie, who played office assistant Marc St. James. And, okay, it would also help if you are gay and/or Jewish.
Last night Ricky and I went to see Buyer & Cellar, a one-man show about an imaginary out-of-work actor who takes a job in the not-imaginary, perfectly-staged, fake old-town shopping mall in Streisand's Malibu basement. (The mall is real! She wrote a book about it!)
Urie completely engages the audience as the actor/narrator who sometimes falls into other characters while recounting conversations between him and: his boyfriend; Streisand's female assistant; James Brolin; and, yes, even Barbra herself.
In the neon-deprived, angled and sometimes curvy streets of the West Village, we found the quaint Barrow Street Theatre, with about 100 seats, simple blacked-out walls, and, for this show, a sparse set of three small, easily movable pieces of white furniture. The show runs for an uninterrupted 95 minutes, and Urie makes the audience feel like it's just us having a little visit with lots of laughs together, our interest never lagging as he presents writer Jonathan Tolins' monologue/dialogue that somehow makes Streisand seem nuts but not nuts, mean but not mean, unsympathetic but sympathetic. I'm not sure how the production pulls this off, but it does.
Intimate theater setting. Sharp funny dialogue. Great acting. Fun night. Go!
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