Theater: The Power of One

(2 of 2)

But these tours de force can start looking forced awfully quickly. Goldberg's new show is an update of her 1984 Broadway collection of character sketches that launched her career, with a couple of new voices mixed in. But the thing seems slapped together without any dramatic shape or reason, other than to let Goldberg get off some anti-Bush zingers (put in the mouth, unconvincingly, of her drugged-out street-hustler character Fontaine). Ensler has done a much better job of shaping The Good Body. But that critique of America's obsession with thinness, based on her interviews with women dissatisfied with their bodies, seems a pale follow-up to her 1996 breakthrough, The Vagina Monologues. (The producers have already announced that The Good Body will close in January.)

Stand-up comics, of course, do one-person shows every night, in clubs and concert halls, so it's no surprise that they would eventually make an assault on Broadway. The bigger question is whether they belong there. Cantone, a New York City comic and actor perhaps best known for his recurring role as Charlotte's wedding planner in Sex and the City, is a talented, high-voltage performer with a bag of good impressions (Julia Child, Sammy Davis Jr.) and a bitchy, high-camp sensibility. But despite some second-act musings about his family, including his mother's death from cancer, Laugh Whore seems a largely impersonal, oversized cable-TV special. Which the Showtime-produced show soon will be.

Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance!--the second Broadway outing for the saucy, violet-haired, spangle-spectacled matron played by Australian actor Barry Humphries--has, by contrast, no trouble filling the stage. And it's not just the piano player and the four dancers who accompany him. Humphries has built an entire show out of that old comedy-club staple of bantering with the audience. But the earnestly solicitous singsong with which Dame Edna delivers her well-practiced sucker punches ("I love the outfit you've chosen." Beat. "Is it reversible?") robs them of any meanness or condescension. Humphries is one comic who has also done the work of a playwright: he has created a character who totally envelops us in his--her--world. Go in skeptical; come out disarmed.

At one point in her show, Dame Edna drags half a dozen audience members onstage and forces them to play roles in a scene from her childhood. Crystal spends his entire show taking his own life very seriously. But that doesn't mean he has reinvented himself as a sad clown. Crystal's show is a scripted extension of his stand-up material, with lampoons of his Jewish relatives--the cranky uncles, the chain-smoking aunt in Boca Raton who regales a friend on the phone with tales of her daughter's lesbian wedding--and enough one-liners and physical business to keep his fans happy. But he's also paying tribute to his family, especially his jazz-loving father (who produced concerts by such greats as Billie Holiday), and working out some unresolved guilt (over the fight they had about chemistry homework the night his father died). Written in part with Alan Zweibel and directed by Des McAnuff, 700 Sundays doesn't escape sentimentality and is too long. But Crystal has rubbed out the line between stand-up and self-revelation. And all by yourself on Broadway, that's a gutsy thing to do. --With reporting by Deirdre van Dyk