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Hail Caesar in Simon's 'Laughter'
By SUSAN L. RIFE, Sarasota Herlad-Tribune
'Laughter' at the Golden Apple has it all
By Eric Delp, Bradenton Herald
There’s comedy tonight with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, at the Golden Apple.
By Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine
Hail Caesar in Simon's 'Laughter'
By SUSAN L. RIFE, Sarasota Herlad-Tribune
The heyday of the television variety show was defined in the early 1950s by Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows," a 90-minute Saturday-night extravaganza that brought together a team of comedy writers and performers who became household names.
Playwright Neil Simon was among them, as was Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Imogene Coca.
"Can you imagine those guys in a room, trying to turn out 90 minutes of live television every week?" muses Robert Ennis Turoff, executive director of the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre.
On Tuesday, the Golden Apple opens its 2007-08 season with Simon's "Laughter on the 23rd Floor," a comedy based on the madcap behind-the-scenes circumstances of "Your Show of Shows."
The play -- the first nonmusical at the Golden Apple in eight years -- is set in the NBC offices where Caesar's writing team assembled to create each week's show. Max Prince (Sid Caesar's alter ego) rails against the studio for its demand that he cut the show to 60 minutes to better serve a TV audience that was expanding from urban areas to middle America.
"He's fighting his network, trying to protect his writers at the same time," said Turoff, who is directing the production.
To Caesar, the writers were the most important ingredient in the mix that made up the show, a sentiment with which Turoff agrees.
"The writer is the most important part of the performing art, I think," he said. "Without writers, none of us have anything to interpret."
The challenge of interpreting the Sid Caesar/Max Prince character falls to Tom Bengston, who is back on board after a three-year hiatus to study graphic arts.
Bengston has been reading a 79-cent copy of Caesar's autobiography and watching DVDs of the old TV shows from Netflix.
"Almost everything in the show is based on some incident that happened either to the character or to somebody else," he said.
Bengston was impressed by Caesar's ability to recognize and nurture comic talent.
"He surrounded himself on purpose with this bright, brilliant (group of) comedians. There were no rules; therefore, they could do whatever they wanted to do."
"Laughter on the 23rd Floor" opened on Broadway in 1995, one of a long string of Simon hits that have included "The Odd Couple, " "Biloxi Blues," "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and "Lost in Yonkers."
For Turoff, it's appropriate for the Golden Apple to pay homage to Simon's talents as a comic playwright.
"We made our living in the early days on Neil Simon," he said. "He kept every theater going."
The show also features Joey Panek as Lucas Brickman (Simon's alter ego); Michael Bajjaly as Milt; Chris Swann as Brian; Kyle Ennis Turoff as Carol, the sole female writer on the team; Sam Mossler as Ira; Cliff Roles as Val; John Russo as Kenny; and Melanie Souza as Helen.
'Laughter' at the Golden Apple has it all
By Eric Delp, Bradenton Herald
Neil Simon's "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" is loosely based on the playwright's tenure as a writer on Sid Caesar's acclaimed "Your Show of Shows" in the 1950s. The play, directed here by Robert Ennis Turoff, portrays the fun and excitement of the writer's room for that legendary sketch comedy show, which employed the genius talents of Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart, among others.
Aside from the huge personalities, wild antics and laugh-a-minute humor of the assembled writers, however, there's also a very touching story about Max Prince (Tom Bengston), the Sid Caesar proxy, struggling those who want to stifle his creative vision. See, all the jokes in the room are defenses against the tension everybody is feeling, because Max has been behaving very strange lately. With the threat posed to performers by Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt and the corporate brass at NBC deciding to cut Max's time and budget in an attempt to get him to dumb down his humor, Max is under a lot of pressure.
Trying to help him through it all are his writers, who are genuinely concerned for him. At the same time, they're worried because the show puts food on their tables. Milt (Michael Bajjaly) is going through a divorce, Ira (Sam Mossler) is an incorrigible hypochondriac, Val (Cliff Roles) is a Russian immigrant very worried about the McCarthy hearings on personal level, Carol (Kyle Ennis Turoff) is having a baby, and Lucas (Joey Panek), our narrator, is new to the job and trying to support his young wife. Everybody is trying to keep things together by churning out the best shows they can.
The brilliance of the show is that it manages to be extremely funny while also being very poignant. Instead of having a bunch of comics throw one-liners around a room for two hours, Simon makes their humor incidental to the much larger and graver story of the danger they are facing. The humor is a shield against the forces threatening their freedom, and it seems natural that so many jokes would arise when a team of crack comics are confronted with such a difficult situation.
But the real heart of the story is Max's attempt to hold together his writing team and maintain the integrity of the show. He knows that he could water the show down and that he and his writers would be rewarded for it, but he can't bear to do it. He delivers a very impassioned speech about the television appealing to the lowest common denominator so that it can attract as many people as possible with the intent of selling them the products that its advertisers dictate. You can tell that he wants his show to be better than that, to stand for something decent and good instead of just selling some laughs and some toothpaste. At the same time, looming over the whole situation is Joseph McCarthy, a grim reminder that anyone who resists authority and doesn't fall in line is punished by the system, severely.
Bengston's Max is a wild-eyed lunatic, kind of paranoid, but incredibly admirable in his convictions. There's a touching moment near the end when Ira says of him, "Noble? He was Moses, for God's sake," and you realize just how much this man stood for and inspired the people around him. The supporting actors are all excellent; I especially appreciated Roles' work as Val, naively compassionate and baldly aggressive at different times, and Mossler's Ira, stubborn and egocentric and hilarious.
In the end, I'd say that this show really has it all: good characters, strong acting, tons of laughs and even something to think about. You can't ask for much more than that.
There’s comedy tonight with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, at the Golden Apple.
By Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine
You don’t have to be old enough to remember Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows to enjoy Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, but it probably helps a little. There’s a fine sheen of nostalgia overlaying this comedy, which goes behind the scenes with the comedy writers of a television program much like the famed Caesar show of the early 1950s. But if you weren’t around when it first aired, you can always try to rent videos or DVDs of the episodes that remain available (some, unfortunately, were lost).
Simon, who wrote for the talented but volatile Caesar, is not the first graduate of the show to write about the formative experience; Carl Reiner admitted that the Dick Van Dyke Show owed a debt to his time at Your Show of Shows, and Mel Brooks’ My Favorite Year certainly captured some of the same frenetic humor of the early days of live TV. Laughter puts young Lucas Brickman (Joey Panek in the current Golden Apple Dinner Theatre production) into the Simon role, a newbie to the writers’ room who’s hoping to make it a lasting job.
There’s plenty of healthy—and perhaps not so healthy—competition from the other writers: Milt (Michael Bajjaly), who tries to stand out with his wardrobe in case his jokes fail; Brian (Christopher Swan), who’s perpetually announcing he’s moving to Hollywood; Kenny (John Russo), who’s relatively level-headed and concerned about the show’s mercurial star; Carol (Kyle Ennis Turoff), the lone woman on the staff, who’s determined to play along with the boys; and Ira (Sam Mossler), whose late arrivals and hypochondria drive everyone else crazy.
There’s also head writer Val (Cliff Roles), a Russian whose accent and impatience make him ripe for teasing by the others. And then there’s Max Prince himself (Tom Bengston), who’s larger than life and charismatic, but also more than a little crazy and drug-dependent.
Throw into the mix some more serious aspects, like the Red-hunting paranoia of Sen. Joe McCarthy and its effects on network television execs, and Laughter successfully brings back an era in American and show biz history.
Not every laugh in the Simon script was mined on opening night; the pacing flagged occasionally. But the show is well cast, with everyone getting a chance to show what they can do. Bengston as Max is properly the center of attention when he’s onstage; Roles demonstrates good comic timing; and Mossler and Bajjaly, in particular, also render highly recognizable comic figures. Overall, Laughter dominates right now on the first floor of the Golden Apple.
Laughter on the 23rd Floor runs through Nov. 18; call 366-5454 or go online at thegoldenapple.com.
* For Mature Audiences Only
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