The current show at Circle in the Square is CHICKEN & BISCUITS. And it’s a big success. Here’s what so surprising about it to the Broadway community:
It’s a comedy.
God forbid!
And not just a comedy — a conventional comedy.
Kind of a familiar plot — relatives fighting after a funeral. But apparently it’s funny.
Blasphemy!
While every other play on the Great White Way is heavy, experimental, and “important,” audiences are turning to a show where they can laugh.
As disturbing as this concept might be, people occasionally want to go to the theatre to enjoy themselves.
They don’t always want to be challenged, to be lectured, to be made to feel guilty.
What really surprises me is how this is always a surprise to Broadway. For every THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG there are five award-winning OSLO’S that close. They named a theatre for Neil Simon yet don’t seem to remember what his contribution was.
The big issue in theatre this year of course is diversity. And that’s fine. But that shouldn’t dictate subject matter and genre. Douglas Lyons, the playwright of CHICKEN & BISCUITS is Black. So what? People are going because they want to be entertained. And Lyons delivers the goods.
I congratulate everyone involved in the production of CHICKEN & BISCUITS for taking the daring courageous step of staging an actual show that people want to see.
31 comments :
God, I LOVED The Play That Goes Wrong! Owing to a severe illness and surgery, I was not able to see it until its Los Angeles closing night, so I only got to see it once. Had I been able to attend an earlier performance, I would have immediately bought tickets for further performances. Mischief Theatre, please bring it back to L.A.!
I've become obsessed with the Mischief Theatre's shows. I have Peter Pan Goes Wrong, A Christmas Carol Wrong and the first season of The Goes Wrong Show on DVDs (Pal discs. I had to buy an all-regions player. It was worth it), and am watching currently the new season of The Goes Wrong Show, which just concluded its run in England last night, on a streaming service. And I bought the published scripts for The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Nativity Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery. The amazing international success of The Mischief Theatre is plenty of proof that audiences love to laugh, and also that comedies don't have to be talky and turn into dramas in act two. (Nothing makes me more nuts than comedies that turn into dramas in act 2.) They even proved that slapstick, elaborate, amazing slapstick comedy, can work onstage. Gags "borrowed" from Chaplin and Keaton abound in the Goes Wrong productions. It was only 13 years ago that The Mischief Theatre was just doing improv in London clubs for audiences that were smaller than the troupe. The trouper spirit of Shari Lewis lives on them, even if none of them know who she was.
Hi Ken!
This post reminded me that I meant to thank you for bringing The Play That Goes Wrong to my attention. Saw it when I was in NY in 2019. Picked it fairly blind just based on you saying kind things about it. Absolutely loved it. Worth reading your blog this past decade just for that recommendation.
Thanks!
Kris
It's a tough line to draw. On the one hand, it's valuable to have "challenging" shows, things that maybe push audiences outside of their comfort zones. But that can't be everything.
The community theatre I used to act with had a pretty good balance, I think. In a typical year we'd do five productions: a musical, a Christmas show, two comedies, and a drama. Either the drama or one of the comedies would probably be a so-called "socially important" show, but to go in one of the comedy slots it would have to still be funny.
Our artistic director actually wanted to do more of that kind of stuff, but she never tried, because she understood full well the supply and demand of it all. There's enough demand for those sorts of prestige pieces to justify making some of them, but they definitely can't be the majority.
We seldom get to NYC, but we were there a few years ago when Laura was performing at the Metropolitan Room. We had one free night before coming home, so I decided to see what Broadway show looked good and had cheap last minute tickets. We'd never heard of "The Play That Goes Wrong," but the quotes on the poster were good, and I could get balcony seats for 35 bucks. Glad we did: it was one of the funniest nights we've ever spent in a theater. The set alone deserved a Tony Award.
I think that the communal experience of comedy is wonderful. But sometimes jokes aren't enough to entice me to pay Broadway prices unless there's something greater to the experience. Reasonably priced Broadway tickets are usually for seats that have bad sightlines or are high up, otherwise you're looking at $300-$400 dollars for a pair. Last week, I went to see The Lehman Trilogy which blew me away and stayed with me long after the performance. It was a master class of acting, directing, writing and staging and an experience that can't be replicated outside of live theater. I would love to see much more but the prices necessitate me being selective and missing out on some good stuff.
My points exactly, Ken. This is my review. https://www.theaterpizzazz.com/a-flavorful-chicken-biscuits/
ON a related, but different topic, the Guardian today has a piece asking if the sitcom is dead: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/26/the-last-laugh-is-the-television-sitcom-really-dead
*Before* you write it off as "oh, this again", I will point out that the article praises a long list of British comedies, many of which may have escaped notice here. So it's worth checking out for that.
Ken, you may like one of that list in particular if you haven't seen it: FRIDAY NIGHT DINNERS. It's about a Jewish family...
Also, to anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend KATE AND KOJI, in which a grumpy seaside English cafe owner (Brenda Blethyn) develops a friendship with an asylum-seeking doctor (Jimmy Akingbola) who frequents her cafe. Like MASH, one of the things that makes it good is that there are real stakes under the comedy.
wg
wg
Good to hear about Chicken & Biscuits. And wholeheartedly agree with all the praise for all things "Goes Wrong". Saw it twice on Broadway and once here in LA, and I'd happily see it again. My stomach literally (not figuratively-literally) hurt from laughing every time. And those performers should all be getting stunt pay. Goes Wrong Show Seasons 1 & 2, plus their Christmas Carol is available on Broadway HD, btw. Worth the $9 to binge for a month.
To those who loved "The Play that Goes Wrong" (like me): The creators also did two seasons of "The Goes Wrong Show" for the BBC a couple of years ago. Equally as brilliant. And that doesn't include two Christmas specials: "A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong" and my favorite, "Peter Pan Goes Wrong". They are available on some streaming channels, including BroadwayHD and Amazon Prime. You'll have to pay to see them, but worth every penny!
A community theater group hereabouts is doing "The Play That Goes Wrong" later this season, and for the life of me I can't figure out how, given what's required of the cast and that the set for the show is one big, elaborate special effect. Maybe the play's creators came up with a scaled-down version of the script for local productions.
Part of what "goes wrong" with the play may be letting community theater groups like this one get their hands on it.
I know I'll be lambasted for saying this but I am sick of hearing about diversity, representation and inclusion. Have any of the proponents checked out Bollywood cinema or Nollywood cinema (Nigerian films) or Egyptian cinema or Japanese cinema or Chinese cinema? Not a whole lot of diversity and representation there.
There's nothing wrong with having diverse casts as organic to the story or as freely chosen by the director, but what this relentless and tiresome campaign is demanding is across the board "inclusion" as a fixed mandate regardless of dramatic content or intent. That is completely antithetical and irreconcilable with the natural creation of art. Art is subjective in creation and cannot and should not be made in accordance with predetermined elements.
Do we wish George Eliot had written more diverse characters in Middlemarch? Should The Godfather have included more representation even if it would have been incongruous to its setting? Was Steven Spielberg wrong not to include some diversity in Schindler's List regardless of the fact it would have made it historically inaccurate? Is 2001: A Space Odyssey a bad film because it didn't feature a BIPOC cast? Should Citizen Kane be dropped from the lists of all time greatest films because, as we keep hearing again and again, "representation matters"? By the same token, is Do the Right Thing an inferior movie because it lacked any Arab, Chinese or Native American characters? Is Boyz n the Hood a bad movie because Lebanese people weren't represented?
You cannot have good art if its entire creation from inception is based on arbitrary absolutes. That's not art or creativity, that's something assembled from compulsory prescripts to satisfy a political demand.
This sort of thing used to happen without fanfare or self congratulation. I remember as a kid when Billy Dee Williams was cast as Harvey Dent in the 1989 Batman. No one made a big deal out of it and he was terrific in the role. Now, such a casting announcement is accompanied by a hundred articles about how it's revolutionary, and all the poor actor ever gets asked about in interviews is how he feels to be part of this important moment in diversity, inclusion and representation. It is so incredibly patronizing to the actors, whose artistry is reduced to just being symbols.
Going to the theater is now a production in itself, and usually a very expensive one. There's a sense whatever's on the stage had BETTER be big and/or important, not just a merry throwaway. Once upon a time it was enough to have some appealing unknowns doing a mild farce with a few catchy songs. There were a ton of them every season, and theater lovers could afford to see a bunch. Except for the occasional red-hot hit, it could be as casual as picking a movie, with no serious resentment for the random disappointment.
(My own theatergoing these days is mostly a local professional company. I buy in for the season, recognizing few of the titles on the schedule. There are a lot of plays I wouldn't seek out, but I have the tickets and I end up enjoying them. It helps that the company is consistently professional with solid productions, and that their usual venues are easy to get to.)
The same thing happened to movies, when radio and then TV became the main provider of light amusement. To get you out of the house the picture show had to deliver some kind of heft for your money: giant screens, epic settings, superstars, and Stuff You Can't See On Television. These days it's bloated CGI-heavy franchises, but the die was cast when the Marx Brothers were saddled with romantic subplots and musical numbers. You could get pure Funny on the radio for free; a movie had to at least feel more substantial.
As for "The Play That Goes Wrong", I've seen chunks of it and it is funny, but it's not new. "Noises Off" (the stage version, not the movie burdened with surplus plotting) gives us the same play screwed up three ways: the hash of a rehearsal, late in the run when the cast is barely on speaking terms (seen from the back of the set), and finally the performance where everything goes to hell. There are "Coarse Acting" competitions, carrying on the spirit of a satirical book about community theater with mock Shakespeare and potboilers. And once upon a time there was "Bullshot Crummond" (again, the lovely stage version and not the okay movie), where a small cast delivered a cliched British thriller with hilariously simple special effects. Lately there seems to be a lot of "Bullshot" descendants, in which tiny casts showily essay highly populated stories like "The 39 Steps" or "Around the World in 80 Days".
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG is available on YouTube, free.
I was going to point out the Guardian article but Wendy Grossman got here first. The author notes that while the streaming sites don't produce many new sitcoms they're spending a lot of money for FRIENDS and SEINFELD. One day there may be a channel like TCM where classic TV is presented with due respect and seriousness (no chopping lines out of MASH to cram in more commercials).
This is an unusual take because if you read the trade papers, what they've been wringing their hands about for years is that the only things people want to see on Broadway are big blockbusters (The Lion King, Aladdin, Phantom, Harry Potter, Wicked, Moulin Rouge, Frozen...). Seems to me the exact opposite of what you wrote is true.
1. Aging white men lamenting “diversity” in entertainment once included those who mourned
the passing of all-male casts and blackface. The lamenters ignore the fact that the film•radio•TV gatekeepers traditionally limit or pigeon-hole the diversity of creators, interpreters, and viewpoints.
2. Indian, Nigerian, Egyptian, Japanese, and Chinese films are made in less diverse countries and they reflect the fact
3. The United Kingdom is now 15% non-white and the efforts of a Dickens or Eliot writing today would likely more often represent —if not applaud — that diversity.
4. Non-traditional, Incongruous, ahistorical, or diverse casting are to be encouraged — unless distractingly unbelievable — if only to reduce boredom. e.g. Denzel Washington as Macbeth, Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan, Herbert Marshall as two-legged men
5. For further discussion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
.
Re the price of Broadway shows: I just looked up the cost of attending a performance of "Chicken & Biscuits." It's $70-$225 per ticket, plus a $12-per-person service fee. While I love comedy, I don't love it that much. As a non-rich person, I would shell out that kind of dough for something you can't see anywhere else -- say, the original run of "Hamilton," or a new Stephen Sondheim musical. But while there's plenty of value in laughter, there are also limits -- and for me, this goes past them.
" Buttermilk Sky said...
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG is available on YouTube, free."
Not exactly. What is available on You Tube is a ten-minute cutting performed at the Albert Hall, with the original cast, done for a charity performance, which gives you a taste of what the show can be, and an amateur production, who posted their full performance which, as they lacked the ability or budget to do the full set and production, is merely an approximation of the play. I watched it with the play script in my hand, and their second act is cut to ribbons, with many pages just missing. It in no way compares favorably to the full professional production. It's more The Play That Goes Wrong Goes Wrong. They don't even have the elevator.
"Anonymous Darryl said...
A community theater group hereabouts is doing "The Play That Goes Wrong" later this season, and for the life of me I can't figure out how, given what's required of the cast and that the set for the show is one big, elaborate special effect."
I was visited recently by a lifelong friend who had just retired from a career teaching drama at a high school in Fresno. He mentioned that he'd tried to get the rights to stage a high school production of it.
Turned out he had not seen the show, and had no idea that the technical requirements of the show went far beyond the technical resources his school had. I ran a couple episodes of The Goes Wrong Show for him and he laughed harder than I'd ever seen in the nearly 60 years I've known him, but he also realized that it would have been impossible for him to stage the show.
He was particularly amused by "Max," the character played by the brilliant Dave Hearn, who always gets distracted by the audience, can not stay in character, and loves it when things go wrong. "Max" was clearly a type of amateur actor he'd dealt with a lot teaching high school theater for decades.
In A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, "Dennis," the character who just can not learn his lines, though he knows everyone else's, and who can't really distinguish between dialogue and stage directions, has his lines written all over the set, and must run around, dislodging props and screwing up blocking, to read his lines. I was in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1975, where our "Jack Worthing" did that at the first off-book rehearsal. He was running all over the place, "reading" the set. The rehearsal dissolved into hilarity. We were all falling over laughing. If he'd put as much effort into learning his lines as he put into writing them all over the set and the furniture, he'd have known them.
And our "Jack" was NOT an amateur. He had acted on Broadway, in the original production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play All The Way Home, with Robert Preston and Lilian Gish. His name is in every published copy of the script. I wonder how Lilian Gish would have taken to his scribbling his lines everywhere.
Oops. Hit "Return" by accident. That was me giving the comment by "D."
" Buttermilk Sky said...
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG is available on YouTube, free."
Not exactly. What is available on You Tube is a ten-minute cutting performed at the Albert Hall, with the original cast, done for a charity performance, which gives you a taste of what the show can be, and an amateur production, who posted their full performance which, as they lacked the ability or budget to do the full set and production, is merely an approximation of the play. I watched it with the play script in my hand, and their second act is cut to ribbons, with many pages just missing. It in no way compares favorably to the full professional production. It's more The Play That Goes Wrong Goes Wrong. They don't even have the elevator.
"Anonymous Darryl said...
A community theater group hereabouts is doing "The Play That Goes Wrong" later this season, and for the life of me I can't figure out how, given what's required of the cast and that the set for the show is one big, elaborate special effect."
I was visited recently by a lifelong friend who had just retired from a career teaching drama at a high school in Fresno. He mentioned that he'd tried to get the rights to stage a high school production of it.
Turned out he had not seen the show, and had no idea that the technical requirements of the show went far beyond the technical resources his school had. I ran a couple episodes of The Goes Wrong Show for him and he laughed harder than I'd ever seen in the nearly 60 years I've known him, but he also realized that it would have been impossible for him to stage the show.
He was particularly amused by "Max," the character played by the brilliant Dave Hearn, who always gets distracted by the audience, can not stay in character, and loves it when things go wrong. "Max" was clearly a type of amateur actor he'd dealt with a lot teaching high school theater for decades.
In A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, "Dennis," the character who just can not learn his lines, though he knows everyone else's, and who can't really distinguish between dialogue and stage directions, has his lines written all over the set, and must run around, dislodging props and screwing up blocking, to read his lines. I was in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1975, where our "Jack Worthing" did that at the first off-book rehearsal. He was running all over the place, "reading" the set. The rehearsal dissolved into hilarity. We were all falling over laughing. If he'd put as much effort into learning his lines as he put into writing them all over the set and the furniture, he'd have known them.
And our "Jack" was NOT an amateur. He had acted on Broadway, in the original production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play All The Way Home, with Robert Preston and Lilian Gish. His name is in every published copy of the script. I wonder how Lilian Gish would have taken to his scribbling his lines everywhere.
"Blogger DBenson said...
As for "The Play That Goes Wrong", I've seen chunks of it and it is funny, but it's not new. "Noises Off" (the stage version, not the movie burdened with surplus plotting) gives us the same play screwed up three ways: the hash of a rehearsal, late in the run when the cast is barely on speaking terms (seen from the back of the set), and finally the performance where everything goes to hell. ... And once upon a time there was "Bullshot Crummond" (again, the lovely stage version and not the okay movie), where a small cast delivered a cliched British thriller with hilariously simple special effects."
Whenever I'm in a discussion of the Goes Wrong shows there's always someone thinking they're clever by bringing up Noises Off, to pooh-pooh and give a "Oh, that's been done" smug shot at Mischief. Yes, no one ever said Mischief Theatre invented the idea. Shakespeare didn't invent plays with tragic endings either. Noises Off, which is a very funny show, didn't invent it either.
Back in 1968, well before Noises Off, I was in a production of Little Mary Sunshine, where the director staged it as a production by an amateur company where the two main leads were to spend the entire show trying, in increasingly elaborate ways, to upstage the other, playing it as though the two leads HATED each other but were stuck playing lovers and singing duets, with jokingly bad scenic effects, etc. We were basically doing "Little Mary Sunshine Goes Wrong" 20 years before Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayers were born. And our production, which was staged in Long Beach, CA, was such a hit that we transferred to a theater in Hollywood.
And we didn't invent it either. Look at Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V is basically "Pyramus & Thisbe Goes Wrong."
As long as you brought up Low Moan Spectacular's Bullshot Crummond, for which I share your admiration, I would draw your attention to their own later production, Footlight Frenzy, which was very much a Play That Goes Wrong, and full of amazing slapstick. The stage production was video-taped and aired on HBO decades back. I'm actually in the live audience of the taped performance, as Rodger Bumpass, who was in it, is an old friend I acted with in a comedy troupe for a few years, and he invited me to the taping. (I had already seen the production.) Yes, Ron House (Whom I knew for years, and attended parties in his home) and Low Moan Spectacular were there before the Mischief-makers were born.
I remember going to NYC sometime early to mid 90s to visit a friend and he bought tickets for me, his soon-to-be wife and himself to see Blue Man Group [before they became really huge] at an Off-Broadway theater. I was stunned to find out that they had cost $75.00-which would be about $138.00 in 2021 prices- a piece and remember thinking "If Off-Broadway tickets are that much how can anyone afford to see anything on Broadway?" Since Cirque du Soleil bought them in 2017, I am sure ticket prices are now out of this world. While incredibly entertaining what I remember most is a crap-ton of people coming out of the theater to find their cars had been broken into and their radios [and only radios] had been stolen. Welcome to New York City!
After the last year and a half, I think most of us could use a good laugh. I know given a choice between this, a drama or a musical, I'd choose this. (Given a choice of all Broadway shows I'd pick David Byrne's American Utopia, but I won't be anywhere near Broadway for a while.)
The great American playwright S. N. Behrman, poorly remembered today, wrote to this very subject in "No Time for Comedy." It's a wonderful play, though it is marred for today's audiences by a black maid who, though very funny, feels like a caricature at times. But the division of serious=good and funny=bad is there, charged with wartime anguish... but still a comedy.
Before COVID hit, I saw a touring production of "The Humans," which is a perfectly well-written comedy-drama about a family at Thanksgiving, in one act. It was tricked up with spooky sound effects and a miasma of post-9-11 worry, which had zero to do with the plot, but which was thought necessary to make the play seem Important. Who wants to fork out $150 to watch a one-act one-set Thanksgiving play? Despite excellent performances, the production's Albee-esque insistence on The Dreadful Difficulty of Modern Existence made the evening feel like a third-rate "Twilight Zone" episode.
DBenson, I agree with much of your comment, but all the Marx Broadway hits featured musical numbers, and Groucho himself was fondest of the Thalberg-influenced M-G-M comedies, including "A Night at the Opera." By giving the brothers a goal - to reunite the opera-singing lovers in that case - the insanity continues, but the plot has a point, and the musical numbers give the audience a well-deserved rest period from laughing. This structure is traditional, going back at least as far as commedia dell'arte, and, when the lovers and the songs are good, it works. I've seen (and been in) a few modern commedia-style productions where the romantic quotient can't resist playing dumb, trying to out-gag it up with the clowns - and the audience, exhausted early, delivered diminishing returns to the players. You gots to have a goal, however slight, or why play?
In reply to Darwin's Ghost:
I'm a tad sick and tired of people ginning up outrage over stuff that hasn't happened, or has happened out on the fringes somewhere. I've yet to hear anybody condemn "Citizen Kane" or "2001" for lack of representation; the main complaint is that American cinema as a whole is so generically white (look at old movies where the entire population of NYC is downright Aryan). Credit generations of cowardly executives afraid to offend bigoted exhibitors, and in our own era crybabies who make a living peddling white victimhood. Yes, the pendulum is swinging pretty far, but look at how far back it had been held the other way.
As for all the self-congratulating flackery, what else is new? Pretty much every movie musical ever made is hyped with claims of the being the First to Truly Integrate Story and Music. Everybody involved with the latest remake/ripoff of anything gives speeches about how Boldly Different it's going to be ("Our Batman is going to be -- get this! -- darker and grittier than the Adam West version! And there will be IRONY!"). Every smug and boring "family film" trumpets itself as the only alternative to hardcore porn at your local cineplex. Soon the cowardly hacks of yesterday will be rebranded as courageously unwoke, their weak, pandering cheesefests demanding praise for being clueless and irrelevant.
I've seen a professional version of "A Christmas Carol". The last play I saw was "Spamalot". I won't count "Cats" as we walked out at intermission. That's it for me and seeing plays. The nearest theaters (for plays) for us are in Chicago. Though I wouldn't normally set foot in Chicago right now due to violence and death, I did see a concert at the Chicago Theater last month. My trip there included running into a (probably?) insane young man who frightened the **** out of us. Police were on him immediately as we were in the downtown tourist area. Besides all that, plays are simply too expensive for us.
I would like to thank everyone above who posted about various British TV sitcoms and "The Play That Goes Wrong" being on YouTube. So is the Christmas show and the Peter Pan show. I've bookmarked many of these recommendations. Someone on here recently recommended the British "Ghosts". I watched all that's available and enjoyed it very much. Very creative. I've also been watching the brand new CBS version on Thursday nights. It is following the British version to an extent and I am enjoying it as well. There are some videos pertaining to "Chicken & Biscuits" on Broadway. I'll check those out as well.
Most people wouldn't suggest Schindler's List be more inclusive. That's just plain silly. When 25 Bond movies are made without a diversified cast, that's a completely different and problematic and realistic issue.
And yet...there is no convincing some people. They will never see the light. EVER.
After the Fox, cowritten by Neil Simon, is streaming now free on PlutoTV. It's a caper comedy with Peter Sellers, Victor Mature, and Akim Tamiroff. Very funny and not well known as one of Simon's screenplays, I think it's based on his play.
Diversity issues are complex and deserve more respect than knee-jerk reactions about casting choices. Unequal equity in pay is truly shocking and needs to be improved.
When director Paul Feig cast women (all great comediennes) in the Ghostbusters remake he was slammed with negative feedback from outraged fans of the original version. I think his version is a great watch and even more enjoyable than the original.
There are a lot of good film comedies starring women that seen to attract a lot of sneering reviews and disparagement (e.g., All about Steve with Sandra Bullock, The Boss and Life of the Party with Melissa McCarthy). But they find their audiences and fans love them.
The first game of the World Series took
4 hours and 7 minutes.
The Running time of The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Duck Soup combined;
4 hours and 11 minutes
Peter Pan Goes Wrong is the funniest thing I've ever seen. I had to use my inhaler to prevent an asthma attack, I was laughing so hard.
Planning a late fall trip to NYC - and "Chicken & Biscuits" is now on my to-do list.
I lasted five minutes into that 10 minute performance clip of "The Play That Goes Wrong." Certainly not my "cup of tea."
Chicken and Biscuits will close on November 28th. They were forced to suspend performances after a positive Covid-19 breakthrough case on November 9th. The suspension has been extended through the 19th.
Post a Comment