06:01:41 am 
Musical Hilarity Found In Stage-Struck Boy's Bio
Categories: UncategorizedRemember The Dick Van Dyke Show? I wasn't around to watch it when it ran in prime time, but the reruns of this sitcom created by Carl Reiner have always been able to send me into mild hysterics. Before this show, Reiner (who also was also seen in the series as an egomaniacal, but loveable, TV star) was a regular on Your Show of Shows, where he worked with comedic greats like Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar and Neil Simon. To learn how Reiner got started on the path to working with these greats – and also want to enjoy a theatrical laughfest – then, drop by the York Theatre Company, where Enter Laughing, a musical from Joseph Stein (book) and Stan Daniels (music and lyrics) based on Reiner's semi-autobiographical play of the same name opened last night.
In "Laughing," we're whisked back to the Bronx in the 1930s where David Kolowitz (Josh Grisetti) dreams of becoming a Broadway star. Nothing in this awkward young man's personality or in his world would seem to prepare him for any sort of theatrical career. He works in a machine shop and Emma (Jill Eikenbery), his mother, dreams of the day she'll be able to proudly proclaim that her son is a druggist.
When Marvin (Robb Sapp) tells David about a notice in the paper about a company looking for actors, though, David's off to Manhattan like a shot, where the aging alcoholic actor-manager Harrison Marlowe (George S. Irving) hires him, despite the truly abysmal audition – he even reads the stage direction "enter laughing" – that David, now calling himself "Don" as is the fashion, gives. David/Don's success is due to the fact that Marlowe's daughter Angela (Janine LaManna) thinks the young hopeful is cute. Her romantic intentions, not surprisingly, create problems for David with his girlfriend Wanda (Emily Shoolin), who's so smitten she's wiling to front him the ten bucks he needs to buy a tuxedo for the show. In addition, his involvement with the company sends his mother and, to a lesser extent, his empathetic father Morris (Michael Tucker), into a frenzy.
The musical shuttles between David's "real" life, his new-found life in the theater, where his innate lack of talent proves side-splitting, and his fantasy life (Walter Mitty has nothing on this kid), and the results are side-splitting, particularly in director Stuart Ross' pitch-perfect production. Ross, the man behind Forever Plaid, a revue focusing on a 1950s era boy singing group, knows his way around the period and this style of comedy, and thus, much of "Laughing" feels as if might have been taken directly from the golden era of television, when the stars with whom Reiner worked ruled the airwaves.
Ross' success, and that of the show in general, are due, in no small part to the clowning antics of Grisetti, who brings to mind a sort of twentysomething cross of Dick Van Dyke and Jerry Seinfeld. Not only is this rubber-faced and limbed actor delightfully goofy, he's enormously appealing, and it's impossible not to root for him from the get-go. Alongside Grisetti is an able group of comedian-singer-actors. LaManna is marvelous as the man-eating Angela and Shoolin's turn as Wanda thoroughly charms. Representing the older generation, Irving (who played the same role in the original company, winning a Tony Award), makes for a delicious early-twentieth century ham and delivers, in his signature style two of Daniels' patter songs to life with panache. And while Eikenberry may be a bit too muted in the role of David's mother, her work and that of real-life husband Tucker gently amuses.
The musical, which unfolds with remarkable fluidity within the confines of a flexible scenic design that takes us backstage of a theater, bounces to its merry conclusion with remarkably few bumps (it's hard to understand why the show when originally produced as So Long, 174th Street lasted only 16 performances on Broadway). Stein's book is filled with hilarious situations and gags, and Daniels' score is filled with engaging tunes and spritely lyrics, that bring to mind a period that's not so distant, when both musical theater and television were simply about having fun.
---- Andy Propst
Enter Laughing plays at The Theatre at Saint Peter's (Lexington Avenue just south of 54th Street). For tickets, schedule, and further information call 212-935-5820 or visit www.yorktheatre.org
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