2/14/08

Buckle up for wild comic ride in "Laughter on the 23rd Floor"

by Sam Severn

Warning: The Everett Theatre’s production of “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” by Neil Simon does not come equipped with seat belts.

Audiences will wish they had ‘em.

This wild ride into the loony bin of early TV clowns battling to be the King of Comedy will have innocent playgoers reeling from all the side-splitting silliness.

A peek backstage into the Golden Age of Television, the entire show takes place in a one-room office on the 23rd floor high over 1953 New York. It’s Neil Simon’s comic valentine to his days as a lowly comedy writer at NBC, when he competed with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and other assorted funnymen to see who could spring the zaniest gags on McCarthy-era America.

In Everett Theatre’s sterling production, it’s a two-hour laugh-fest of loony-toons comedians, fighting and writing to be the head madman at the funny farm.

Every actor in this cuckoo’s nest hits the jackpot of comic insanity.

Baby-faced Logan Wolff portrays junior jokester Lucas, Neil Simon’s alter ego in the show. The 18-year-old is the audience’s eye into this wacky world, and straightman to all the other lunatics. He combines warmly narrating Simon’s memoir-like asides with lobbing one-liners like fat pitches for his fellow nutcases to belt out of the park.

As the pill-popping, paranoid ‘50s TV host Max Prince, Manuel Barbosa is brilliantly over-the-top. He’s a bang-up mix of jittery nerves and neurotic nuttiness, always caught in the midst of his next nervous breakdown while trying to survive the pressure cooker of creating a weekly live television show. With his rubbery face and bugged-out eyes, he could be a human cartoon.

The rest of the cast is just as inspired.

J. Ryan Azevedo is a jazzy live-wire as Milt. Justin Tinsley wonderfully plays Val, the Communist comic obsessed with learning to cuss New Yorker-style. Molly Rose Smith shines as Carol, a nervy dame in a man’s, man’s, man’s world. As Kenny, Michael Hudson takes his dim-witted pals, and the hilarious high jinks they’re creating, seriously and with lots of heart. Both James Pinto, as the hot-to-trot-to-Hollywood Brian, and Leilani Aileen Saper as Helen, the office secretary who dreams of becoming a screwball writer, are also outstanding.

The play’s most whacked-out writer is the flatulent hypochondriac Ira, portrayed by Karl Holzheimer. He’s contracted a huge dose of every cancer and canker sore ever diagnosed, and Holzheimer plays the role of the unhinged hambone magnificently.

Director Asa Sholdez — who incredibly has directed only one other stage show — gives this motley crew of bozos and no-brainers lots of elbow room to run wild with Neil Simon’s killer material.

Artistic Director Victoria Walker has created the perfect-looking crummy 1950’s office for this show. You can smell the onion bagels and the stale coffee in the room, and the cigarette smoke is as thick as the tension. Vanessa Bugge’s costumes are character perfect.

Everything in the play works. The jokes zip by in rapid fire. The story races from one episode of zany fun to the next. You’ll wish the jokes, the tricks, and comic shticks ran from dusk ‘til dawn.

But word to Everett Theatre:

Next time, be a pal and install those seat belts.

The play runs weekends through February 24. For tickets and information, contact the Historic Everett Theater box office at (425) 258-6676, or online at www.everetttheatre.org.