The Power of One

The show opens with grainy home movies projected on the façade of a suburban brick house. Out walks a grownup version of the kid in the films: Billy Crystal. For the next two hours and 20 minutes, he reminisces about that house where he grew up, learned how to hit a curveball, discovered masturbation, entertained his relatives with off-color jokes stolen from the Catskills and spent 700 Sundays with his father--the approximate number the two had together, he figures, before his dad died of a heart attack at the bowling alley when Billy was just 15.

If you're a fan of gaudy musicals and pumped-up stage dramas, Crystal's 700 Sundays might seem like a pretty stripped-down piece of theater. But then, you must not go to the theater much. Crystal's autobiographical monologue, which opened last weekend, is the hottest-selling new show of the Broadway season. And while Crystal may be alone on the stage, he's certainly not alone onstage. His is just one of five one-person shows--along with those from Whoopi Goldberg, Mario Cantone, Eve Ensler and Dame Edna--that have opened on Broadway since September.

Intriguing sign of the times or symptom of Broadway's creative poverty? Let's just say that in an era of soaring costs and a dearth of new plays with any assurance of drawing an audience, it's a perfectly logical commercial development. With only one salaried actor and minimal sets and costumes (unless you are Dame Edna), those shows are cheaper to produce than full-scale plays. "You've got a lot less risk with a one-person show and pretty much the same opportunity to make money," says Jay Larkin, an executive producer at Showtime, responsible for Cantone's show, Laugh Whore. And since many of the shows are built around stars with a presold audience, they're easier to promote. "We've got to be realistic," says Hal Luftig, the lead producer of Whoopi. "We're asking people to pay a lot of money. There's comfort in knowing what they're getting."

Comfort, alas, is the problem with too many one-person shows. Transforming a historical figure or show-biz great into the vehicle for a star turn (from Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight to Tovah Feldshuh's Golda's Balcony, which opened last season and is still running--so make that six!) seems a lazy way of making rich subject matter easy to digest--and almost guaranteeing a Tony acting nod in the bargain. Then there are the autobiographical shows, which can occasionally be dishy and inspired (Elaine Stritch at Liberty) but just as often superfluous ego trips (Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends). The real growth industry in the past few years, however, has been the puffed-up comedy monologue, from the traditional stand-up of comics like Jackie Mason, Bill Maher and Rob Becker (Defending the Caveman) to the more crafted, character-driven monologues of such performers as Lily Tomlin and John Leguizamo.