THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, October 11, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh

PAGES: 26, including this page

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October 8, 2016

‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ to Open on Broadway

By Joshua Barrone

One of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous heroines, Nora Helmer, is returning to Broadway — but not in “A Doll’s House.”

At the end of Ibsen’s drama, Nora leaves her husband and children with the slam of a door. Lucas Hnath, a playwright with a rising reputation Off Broadway (“The Christians” and “Red Speedo”), picks up where Ibsen left off with his Broadway debut, “A Doll’s House, Part 2.”

The cast includes Laurie Metcalf (HBO’s “Getting On” and “Misery” on Broadway); Chris Cooper (an Oscar winner for “Adaptation”); Condola Rashad (Showtime’s “Billions”); and Jayne Houdyshell, who won a Tony Award this year for her performance in “The Humans.”

The ever-busy Sam Gold, who won a Tony for “Fun Home” in 2015, has signed on to direct. It’s his third scheduled gig this season, along with “Othello” Off Broadway and “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway.

This won’t be the first “Doll’s House” sequel to reach Broadway. In 1982 Harold Prince directed the Broadway flop “A Doll’s Life,” a musical about Nora’s love life after leaving her husband, Torvald.

Performances for “A Doll’s House, Part 2” begin April 1 at the John Golden Theater, with opening night set for April 27 — just under the wire for Tony Awards eligibility. (Another, previously scheduled production will run at South Coast Repertory from April 9 through April 30.) Scott Rudin will produce; he picked up the play for Broadway based on its script alone, according to Vulture, which first reported the news.

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October 8, 2016

Kennedy Center Taps Broadway Producer to Lead Theater Programming

By Michael Paulson

The Broadway producer Jeffrey Finn has been named to oversee theater programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

The center announced the appointment on Thursday, saying that Mr. Finn would begin work Friday with the title of vice president of theater producing and programming. The job is a new position.

Mr. Finn was the lead producer of “An Act of God,” a comedy that ran on Broadway each of the last two summers, and he has been a producer on a dozen other Broadway productions since 2005. He plans to continue producing on Broadway — he is currently working on a musical adaptation of “The Honeymooners” television series.

At the Kennedy Center, Mr. Finn will be charged with “commissioning, curating, producing and presenting work,” according to a statement from the institution.

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October 10, 2016

Review: ‘Miles for Mary,’ a Sendup of the Interminable Meeting From Hell

By Ben Brantley

Though Dante cataloged many forms of diabolical torture in his “Inferno,” a guided tour of hell, he somehow missed out on what could well be the most excruciating eternal punishment of all. I mean (ominous organ chords, please) the staff meeting that never, ever ends.

You’ve surely been a part of such sessions. They’re those gatherings in which people waste time by talking about how to be more productive, with algebraic visual aids and a corporate jargon of uplift that turns sensitive souls suicidal.

Still, it is a fundamental law of art and entertainment that other people’s discomfort can make for deeply satisfying comedy. The meeting from hell has been deliciously dissected on television satires like “The Office” and“W1A,” BBC Two’s blissful fictional portrait of life at the BBC. Now “Miles for Mary,” which opened on Saturday night at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, asserts its claim to belong among such painfully pleasurable company.

It also goes one agonizing step further than such small-screen fare in that it never for a second leaves the meeting room and only rarely abandons the artificial and often inane language of such encounters. Running at an uninterrupted hour and 45 minutes, this meticulous creation from the Mad Ones theater troupe would send you bolting for the exit, screaming, if it weren’t so funny and unexpectedly touching.

The Mad Ones, which devises and scripts its plays as a group, is an ensemble company in the fullest sense. Surely, such cluster creativity, with its inevitable clash of perspectives and ideas, must give rise to its own set of tensions in rehearsals.

In any case, “Miles for Mary,” which is set in an Ohio high school office where a group of teachers conduct a series of preparatory meetings for a charity television marathon, provides an ideal showcase for this company’s strengths. As directed by Lila Neugebauer, with a precision-tuned six-member cast, the production cannily uses interactive acting to plumb the dysfunction in group dynamics.

The Mad Ones describes itself as specializing in American nostalgia. And it usually sets its works — which include the highly praised 1950s-themed“Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War” — in decades defined by both photorealist detail and warping touches of surrealism.

“Miles for Mary” takes place in the 1980s, and its conscientious design team anchors the play in time with the appropriate clothing and technological accessories, which include audiocassette tapes, VCR players and, most memorably, a tinny speaker phone by which a housebound teacher on pain killers participates woozily in the meetings. But the Mad Ones avoids its usual fantastical accents.

True, there is one fleeting surreal apparition of a character dressed as an undefinable animal, presumably a school mascot. But as in an Alan Ayckbourn farce, the play’s increasing absurdity arises from natural causes. Or as natural as is possible within the stiff and elaborate workplace protocol by which these characters govern their encounters.

They assemble to discuss the 1989 edition of their big annual charity project, a 24-hour (more or less, everything is exasperatingly open to discussion) homemade television show to raise money for a scholarship named for a student track star killed in a car crash. The theme, the acts, the scheduling and proper use of phones are all subject to seemingly infinite parsing.

So is the very way in which the teachers address one another, a psychobabble presumably born of workshops on treating students with sensitivity. (“I want to apologize if I got into game mode when it wasn’t game time,” says a burly health teacher.) If feelings are hurt as opinions collide, everyone knows that “a real-time check-in” is called for. Such psychological devices defuse potential explosions until, inevitably, they start to feed them.

When the blowup comes, from the seemingly meekest of the group, it’s because he feels that this kind of talk is patronizing to him. And as a depiction of earnest amateurs’ being creative (the marathon’s proposed themes include a Genesis concept album), “Miles for Mary” flirts with the condescension that occasionally surfaces in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries about small-time theater troupes and dog shows.

But the show is expert in deploying the slogan-driven speech of self-help as a tool of passive aggression. And while there is little in the way of direct exposition — we don’t even realize that two of the characters are married to each other for the first 15 or 20 minutes — we come to infer a very specific set of personalities, with private kinks and woes behind the workplace personas.

The cast is made up of Marc Bovino, Joe Curnutte, Michael Dalto, Amy Staats, Stephanie Wright Thompson and Stacey Yen, and their performances are so indivisibly linked that it would be an injustice to single one out. Ms. Neugebauer, who is fast establishing herself as one of the finest ensemble directors in New York, has this season already given us the smashing production of Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” another vivid group portrait.

That play, too, is set in a high school, though its focus is students instead of teachers. “Miles for Mary” might be profitably seen as a companion piece to“The Wolves,” though anyone searching for assurances that life gets better and people grow up as they become older is unlikely to find comfort here. On the other hand, if people ever really grew up, what would we do for comedy?

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October 11, 2016

Review: Taylor Mac’s 24-Hour Concert Was One of the Great Experiences of My Life I’ve slept on it, and I’m sure. “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is sublime.

By Wesley Morris

So after almost 21½ hours and two centuries’ worth of singing, dancing, and jiggling; after all 650 of us had been asked to re-enact everything from the Civil War and the Oklahoma land rush to white flight to the suburbs; after a narcotically swampy rendition of “Amazing Grace” and a production of “The Mikado” that glowed in the dark because its minstrelsy might make sense if it was set on Mars; after visionary drag-queen costumes that called to mind descriptions like geisha Andrews Sister and Tiki apocalypse; after we’d stood in lines for small portions of bread and split pea soup at 3 a.m. and not many people took the bread (because even during a poignant Depression homage some people will still refuse to eat a carb); after we’d batted around an enormous stars-and-stripes penis balloon whose design really did look more like the flag of Puerto Rico and then made a funeral procession for Judy Garland’s corpse; after a mash-up of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”; after Taylor Mac, the performance artist who dreamed this whole thing up, had cavorted onstage and in the laps and arms of strangers; after all of this — the delirium, the mania, the possibly simulated sex — it might have been the balloon that broke us.

It was around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday. Most of us hadn’t slept since the show had begun Saturday at noon, because Mr. Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” was intended to last a magnificent 24 hours.

With the finish line in sight, the balloon stopped by. It was pink and at least partly full of helium. But it did that thing balloons sometimes do: It gained consciousness. Making its way around the audience and inevitably onto the stage inside the vast St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, the balloon slowed down and took in Mr. Mac. As it regarded him, we laughed. Maybe, by this point, we were delirious because we watched the balloon for what felt like a very long time. The technicians even adjusted the lighting to capture it.

On the one hand, it was a balloon. On the other, it had become something oracular. Anyway, Mr. Mac, who had given us almost everything he had and was trying to give us the rest, had had enough. “Stop putting the light on it,” he requested, his demeanor somewhere between joking weariness and the real thing. The whole interlude had gone on longer than he thought it should. But I, at least, sensed a spot of admiration, a cosmic grace note. It was the sublime saying “good morning” to the sublime.

Mr. Mac gave me one of the great experiences of my life. I’ve slept on it, and I’m sure. It wasn’t simply the physical feat. Although, come on: 246 songs spanning 240 years for 24 straight hours, including small breaks for him to eat, hydrate and use the loo, and starting in 1776 with a great-big band and ending with Mr. Mac, alone in 2016, doing original songs on piano and ukulele. He remembered all the lyrics and most of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” And he sang them — in every imaginable style, at every tempo, with every possible facial expression and every register of his handsome, protean voice.

An entire day of all that prowess, energy and virtuosity would have been astounding. But Mr. Mac is also a devastatingly intelligent artist of conflation. Spending 24 hours filtering 240 years of predominantly American music — battle hymns, black spirituals, war ballads, minstrel tunes, works songs, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals, Motown, Top 40 and lesbian-feminist punk done up in Afro-beat, the blues and Laurie Anderson sci- fi — through the prerogatives of a drag show is daring.

Yes, that requires an artist who understands the power of drag to subvert convention. And in song after song (after song), Mr. Mac, who’s white, gay and 43 years old, explored the racism, chauvinism, homophobia, misogyny and white supremacy coursing through the history of American song. With all due deference to the subtitle of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” this, too, is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” and at about four times the length.

The “24-Decade” project was, at least in part, about becoming who we Americans want to be, by recognizing who we have been. It’s about artistic confrontation, reinterpretation and personal transcendence. The scope of the project allows you to consider the centuries of artistic ghosts we live with. (Mr. Mac’s tagline was “radical faerie realness ritual.”)

Not everything in “24-Decade” worked. His sustained disdain, for instance, for cultural appropriation probably kept him from making a clearer identification with slaves as individuals. His moral grasp of the larger picture costs him the richness of the smaller, human one. He’s much better at attacking racists and racism than fleshing out their victims.

But the show got its power from Mr. Mac’s larger, subjective moral force. He keeps most of the decades humming with queerness and problematized whiteness, inventing characters and ghosts in his stories to dramatize the issues of the day. Early on, he made a stirring case for the British homophobia of “Yankee Doodle,” and lets you think its standing as an American staple is an early example of American re- appropriation. Anyway, I’ll never hear the song the same way again, and I’ll probably always only hear his version, which keeps speeding up until it reaches death-metalvelocity.

By about 10:30 a.m., donning a giant pair of butterfly wings, Mr. Mac mustered the fire to shred through a version of Sleater-Kinney’s “One Beat.” He stalked the St. Ann’s stage in his bare feet and in comically high heels. He sang through costume changes and through near-mishaps. (At one point, it looked as if the audience members carrying him from table to table were going to drop their load.) He never lost his sense of humor or the pathway to any of the punch lines in his 24 hours of stage patter or his knack for the dramatic and comedic power of holding a silence. Normally, he’s a star. This weekend he was a solar system.

But why were we there? It’s an important question. Unlike my other experience with a 24-hour magnum opus, Christian Marclay’s film-clip montage “The Clock,” this one needs an audience. For one thing, the audience member’s chairs had to be moved several times — to do war and segregation and dinner — and they weren’t going to move themselves. Really, though, we were there because this ultimately is, on top of everything else, a show about empathy and identification.

Mr. Mac devoted an entire hour, 1846 to 1856, to a figurative, four-round battle for the title of Father of American Song. His opponents were Stephen Foster and Walt Whitman. Sounds gimmicky, but it was actually brilliant.

The match was staged in a makeshift boxing ring and required the audience to pelt the loser with Ping-Pong balls. Initially, the fix seemed in. (The balls hit only the poor but game audience member standing in for Foster; Mr. Mac gloriously embodied Whitman.) The aim was disproving Foster’s professed abolitionism by playing up the racism of songs like “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” and “Camptown Races.” Whitman, meanwhile, wasn’t much of an abolitionist. (He was there as a queer pioneer.) Mr. Mac’s question, though, wasn’t “Who was the

better abolitionist?” The point was that Foster’s lack of empathy made him — and other white people like him — a dubious abolitionist.

The audience was as essential to this performance as we are inessential to Mr. Marclay’s masterpiece. Those clocks keep ticking whether or not you’re there to watch them. But you need people for empathy. And Mr. Mac had hundreds (and retained most of them). We were asked to be racists and homophobes. And act like they would act, to feel how hate feels.

But also, in Mr. Mac’s way, to feel love and experience the shedding of shame. That entailed asking a great deal of himself, which entailed asking a lot of others — of his band and crew; of the artsy helpers (his “dandy minions”), who were also very much part of the show; of his ingenious musical arranger, Matt Ray, and endlessly witty costume designer, who goes by the name Machine Dazzle and helped Mr. Mac change outfits onstage. Off to its right was a napping loft. And at some point, sleeping bags were distributed, but lots of us managed to stay awake for most, if not all, of this event. So you paid the price of admission, which also seemed to include a night of dreamlessness.

That, of course, might have been the point. What if some of America’s trouble is that we’ve been too caught up in our own individual dreams — that some dreams mean a nightmare for somebody else. What if Mr. Mac’s fantasia was the anti-dream, and those 24 beautiful hours were about the wisdom of staying woke?

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October 10, 2016

In ‘Oh, Hello on Broadway,’ John Mulaney and Nick Kroll are witty young men playing funny old men

By Peter Marks

NEW YORK — The ghastly wordsmith George St. Geegland and the bottom-drawer actor Gil Faizon have made it to Broadway. And would you believe? It’s right where they belong.

Their unlikely showbiz ascension is exactly the outcome we deserve, too — those of us who don’t mind a few lung-punishing laughing jags of an evening, in the theater. Or as George and Gil might pretentiously aver: a night on the Rialto. With an accent placed incorrectly on the “o.”

They are, separately and together, in their baggy corduroy pants and supercilious cluelessness, a hilarious act, the thirty-something comedians who portray the septuagenarian Upper West Side stooges of “Oh, Hello on Broadway.” Blessed with a gift for antic, topical wit, a palpable love of the stage and a bizarre fixation on tuna fish sandwiches, comedians John Mulaney and Nick Kroll hold a theater crowd in their loony spell for a giddy, galloping 90 minutes in the Lyceum Theatre, where the show had its official opening Monday night.

Judging from the audience’s enthusiastic greeting, the duo has acquired a following as a result of George and Gil’s appearances on Kroll’s now-ended Comedy Central sketch-comedy program, “Kroll Show”; a well- received off-Broadway run in 2015, and a national tour. It’s devotion well-earned, because these comedians, who met as undergraduates at Georgetown University, have sharpened to a very funny point an acumen for keeping an audience off-balance — and eager for more.

Their brand of comedy is a winning melange of all the brows: low, middle and high. One minute they’re making a potty joke and the next they are perpetrating a sight gag at the expense of “The Pillowman.” (You’re not familiar with that mid-2000s play by Martin McDonagh about fairy tales and torture in a totalitarian state? That’s okay: the bit will strike you as funny, anyway.) In a curtain speech at the start of the performance, nicely shepherded by a simpatico director, Alex Timbers, the team explains why they aimed for Broadway. “Theater is the hot new thing,” George says. “There’s ‘Hamilton’ … [long pause] … and no other example.”

George and Gil are Manhattan’s saddest-sack odd couple, virtually unemployable and seemingly unfit for any normal relationship: George boasts of the elegant symmetry of the deaths of his three wives, all of whom fell down the same flight of stairs. The big break that got away from Gil years earlier entailed an audition to be the voice of CBS, a tryout in which he thought the appropriate signoff would be, “This is CBS, baby!” So now, George, in his finite wisdom, has written a play for them both that allows Mulaney and Kroll to make fun of all sorts of theatrical conventions, like the slow fade into darkness at the end of a searing drama, or the stage-y, one-sided telephone conversations in which an actor holds a receiver and has to characterize for the audience all of the important words of the caller.

These are terrific bits of observational comedy — and more successful, I think, than an interlude halfway through, involving a third player who’s invited into the proceedings. I won’t spill any details, but it’s a gimmick with a marginal payoff. At least in comparison to the unalloyed fun we all have during the other 70 or so minutes with George and Gil and their assorted, hysterical hangups.

Oh, Hello on Broadway, by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. Directed by Alex Timbers. Set, Scott Pask; costumes, Emily Rebholz; lighting, Jake Degroot; sound, M.L. Dogg; special effects, Basil Twist; makeup, Annamarie Tendler Mulaney. About 90 minutes. Tickets, $59-$250. At Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., New York. Visit telecharge.com or call 212-239-6200.

October 10, 2016

TOO FUNNY Nick Kroll and John Mulaney Make a Zany Riot of ‘Oh, Hello on Broadway’ ‘Oh, Hello’ has migrated from a Comedy Central sketch show to a brilliant, surreal, zinger-filled Broadway hit.

By Tim Teeman

There is, now three days later, still the inner chuckle that comes with muttering “Brudway,” as Gil Faizon (Nick Kroll) and George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) mispronounce New York’s theaterland. Or “cuh-caine.”

The repetitive collapsing of vowels in so many of their words should be a one- note joke, and it should become tiresome. Instead these mis-words glintingly stud Oh, Hello on Broadway, a 90-minute “Brudway” show that has blossomed from a sketch on Comedy Central’s Kroll Show.

Here, fans can see Faizon and St. Geegland bathe in an infectious, self-conscious zaniness on stage, and many will be tickled by any stray “Oh, hello,” and “Charmed, I’m sure,” from their two heroes.

If you haven’t yet met them, the characters Kroll and Mulaney play are two aging theater-loving duffers, lacking full command of language, self-awareness, and sensitivity, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, “the coffee breath of neighborhoods.”

The writer (St. Geegland) and actor (Faizon) are legends in their own perversely unfulfilled lunchtimes. They should have been contenders, and the play they perform for us is the story of their supposedly platonic friendship and professional travails (the main characters transformed into “George Reddington” and “Gil Stone”), with a dizzying battery of insults, jokes, and riffs on theater thrown in, like deconstructing “the one- sided phone call.”

Willie Geist, at a 92Y event, said George had been born “to verbally abusive parents,” hosting an imaginary talk show in his Long Island childhood bedroom from which he was banned as a guest. Later a professor, he “resigned for stuff which remains in sealed documents.”

Gil “is a stand-in model for mashed potatoes and other creamed foods. When photographing mashed potatoes, Gil lies there so they can get the lighting right.”

The play Faizon and St. Geegland will perform for us has been made possible by the “Lillian Hellman Female Playwriting Initiative, who has accidentally funded this production.”

Every word is the opportunity for a ridiculous gag: “In this deeply haunted theater, so many great playwrights put up their work. Tennessee Williams and his sister Serena.”

“The magic of Broadway. That’s what this play is,” said George. “It’s a love letter to theater…” “Or more of a stalker’s note scrawled in lipstick on a mirror,” added Gil.

The men are wounded, hilarious monsters, persecuting Ruvi, their poor lighting operator intern (who misses a spotlight cue at his peril). Their set is, they claim, constructed from jewels of Broadway productions past, including the trap door to Anne Frank’s attic, “not to be confused with the diarrhea of Barney Frank, which we experienced on an Acela train from Washington, D.C.”

One moment Gil and George are being absurdly surreal, the next Kroll and Mulaney are breaking character and cracking up at their own, sometimes made-up-on-the-spot jokes. Gil is a mess of fuzzy hair, tatty trousers, and incontinence; George is sharper-dressed, angrier, and crueler. (In real life, Kroll and Mulaney look young and very handsome.)

Like any good comedic duo, Faizon and St. Geegland need each other desperately, even when things go a little Baby Jane.

Faizon and St. Geegland would like us to think of them as good friends, in deep, devoted love with the arts, but the skillfully written subtext of Oh, Hellohints at something darker—a kind of abusive relationship, with St. Geegland keen to ensure the physically and mentally less robust Faizon knows his place.

The genesis for Oh, Hello, Kroll and Mulaney have said, was being inside New York’s Strand bookstore—“8 miles of books, 12 miles of loneliness”—and seeing two men in turtlenecks and blazers, each buying a copy of Alan Alda’sNever Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned.

The comedians “fell in love” with the two men and imagined them living together, and began to inhabit their characters. Even in their off time they speak like “Gil and George.”

On Broadway, they were hoping to have “as long a preview period as Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, the big- budget musical whose previews went on and on, as the production was beset by disaster after disaster.

“Theater is the hot new thing right now. There is Hamilton and no other examples,” said George. “I’m Gil Faizon. I’m a Tony Award-viewing actor,” said Gil.

The men love Swedish fish, “the Cadillac of gummies,” and Werther’s Originals, “the original Amber Alert of caramels.”

Fame, they welcome. “We’re hitting a critical b’clash, like T’m Cruise,” Faizon and St. Geegland insisted to Seth Meyers last year, as Faizon squatted on his chair as Cruise had famously leapt on Oprah’s couch. He looked like “a little raccoon,” said George.

A mocking cartoon in The New Yorker was merely testament to a contentious relationship with the same magazine they would steal from their homeopath vet’s waiting room.

At a press conference, Faizon and St. Geegland said they had met the show’s director, Alex Timbers (full disclosure: cousin of Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon), “during litigation. He’s the genius behind Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and we had the musical Bloody Bloody Tito Jackson. He took us to court and won big.”

To a New York Post reporter, one of the men noted of Anthony Weiner: “You did not give enough attention to how smooth and weird his chest was. I think that was lost in the narrative… The fact that a child was in the shot was not weird. It was just to show scale. ‘Oh my god, that’s a baby’s arm…’ In this case it really was.”

Here on Broadway there is also a groaning plate of tuna, as celebrities on their Comedy Central show expect. This prank, which is no prank, sees the two grandiloquent storytellers force a huge plate of tuna on to a hapless celebrity, until they utter the catchphrase: “Too much tuna.”

Bridesmaids director Paul Feig, added pickles and an orange slice to his, causing anger on the part of Gil and George (“Don’t disgrace the tuna”).

On stage in L.A., Bill Hader joined a beset-by-total-hysterics Marcia Clark, who loudly proclaimed there was “too fucking much tuna”; Hader wolfed his down.

The 90 minutes of Oh, Hello comprises sketch and character comedy, rather than a coherent play or a coherent play-within-a-play. The joke is on every dramatic and theatrical convention you have ever unwittingly accepted. On Saturday night, their special “too much tuna” star guest was Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, who remained magnificently deadpan on stage. She would not, as Willie Geist was at the 92Y when he interviewed the men, be forced into saying “Too much tuna” too soon.

Despite the men’s wheedling, she made them wait and was barely monosyllabic in her responses to them. The infinitely more loquacious and tuna-keen Geist was dismissed as a “shithead.”

Rudy Giuliani, recently transformed into Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleader (and on Saturday night, Kroll and Mulaney worked in a magnficient “pussy-grabber” line), may have shut down all the porn merchants of Times Square, but they’ve moved one block west, noted Gil. “There’s even a handjob parlor called Shake Shack,” added George.

“I am neither Jewish nor a woman, but like many older men over 70, I have reached the age where I am somehow both,” George notes. “All three of my wives died the same way on the same staircase, each death improving upon the previous death almost as if it had learned from that death. And fun fact, for tonight, I am on competing medications.”

It was George who told Gil that he had not gotten the CBS announcing job he had been up for (and which may have changed his life), “but he wouldn’t let me sulk for one single second,” said Gil. “Nay nay nay. He made me get right back on the horse. We started doing heroin that afternoon.”

And so the rollercoaster goes on. We learn about theatrical method, like screaming: Gil’s “YOU CAN’T COME OVER FOR LUNCH BECAUSE MY FATHER IS MY BROTHER”; and George’s “DO YOU WANNA KNOW WHY? DO YOU WANNA KNOW WHY, KAREN? BECAUSE I COULD NOT AFFORD MICROSOFT WORD.”

In the play-within-a-play, we learn George is “waiting on a letter from my publisher about my new novel, Next Stop Ronkonkama. It’s the story of a Long Island Rail Road trip told from 100 different perspectives.” George is outraged to discover their rent “is being increased to $2,500 a month? $2,500? For a measly five-bedroom with crown molding, office, and fireplace on 73rd Street?”

Suddenly we are zooming back in time, to the 1950s, where George recalls being encouraged by another boy to see a body on the train tracks, which—yawn—he had already seen; and attending the Chauncey School for Misfits. “It’s just me and a nun and a young Robert Durst. Fun fact. Bobby Durst’s and I'’ mothers jumped off the same roof! But that’s not why I hate women. Which I don’t. And any cunt who says I do isn’t fit to hold my mother’s ashes.”

The years flash by—the ’70s is marked by particularly gray, sugary coffee—and then the chance for stardom at NY1, the news channel no one with Time Warner can avoid, presents itself. And this after a surrealist ballet involving a giant tuna, which the men will hope will net them a special Tony Award.

Events in Oh, Hello move to a time-traversing conclusion—professional and personal success and failure having hurtled by—at the men’s diner. The passage of years is marked by the sporting of a mustache. Gil is looking at new acting parts: “I play a secret agent who is trying to protect his family. It’s titled How Dare You Steal My Daughter.” George has a smash hit young adult novel series, Dracula Jr., so popular “mainly because it describes how to make a bomb.”

The Oh, Hello devoted left the Lyceum in audible bliss, while newcomers were happily dazed by the onslaught of jokes, skits, wordplay, meta-everything, and verbal carnage. Kroll, Mulaney, Faizon, St. Geegland, Reddington, and Stone would want it no other way.

A mini-wave of sadness settled over this audience member, with the knowledge that it will be a while before the late 1970s is captured as vividly it was in Oh, Hello: “New York is a bankrupt, crime-ridden mess and it’s awesome. Tires roll down the street on fire, and inside those tires? Babies with knives.”

Oh, Hello on Broadway runs until Jan. 8. Book tickets here.

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