'Enter' Gets The Laughs At Last

'Enter' gets the laughs at last

STAGE REVIEW

Play based on Carl Reiner novel starts slowly but builds to hilarious climax

BY CHRISTOPHER POTTER

“Enter Laughing” is an ex-mainstay of regional and community theater revived for the first time in years by Ann Arbor Civic Theatre. “Exit Laughing” would have been a more appropriate title: For Joseph Stein’s comedy/romance - adapted from Carl Reiner’s autobiographical novel - grows funnier and funnier as it progresses, happily peaking at show’s end.

Bronx youth David Kolowitz (Reiner’s fictional double) longs to break into the acting profession in New York City circa 1950. His efforts allow director Thom Johnson and his Civic cast to ultimately run wild when “Enter Laughing” climaxes with David’s debut: a play-within-a-play so inept it recalls the histrionic satirical mayhem that made Reiner’s “Your Show of Shows” the greatest TV show of the ’50s.

Yet while the Civic ultimately lifts “Enter Laughing” to sublime comic heights, it takes time to gather requisite steam due to the play’s lumpy exposition. Act I of “Enter Laughing” is an uneasy, talky mix of sentimentality and farce, which laps over to Act II in its early stages.

Young David - a marvelous incarnation by Dan Roehrig, who looks and acts like a cocky city kid out of ’40s movies - craves the spotlight, yet his elders recoil at the notion. His parents (Kim Perlman and Jimmy Dee Arnold) want him to be a druggist, while his fatherly boss (Jon Elliott) of a Bronx sewing-machine shop eyes him as a business inheritor.

David’s dilemma doesn’t make for particularly amusing comedy or compelling drama, nor does his caddish proclivity for juggling girlfriends. When he tells prime sweetheart Wanda (Jaime Beth Platte), “Just because I’m attracted to other girls doesn’t mean I’ve stopped being attracted to you,” would you believe she accepts this coarse explanation? It doesn’t play - nor do Mama and Papa Kolowitz as parodies of Jewish parental overbearingness - in a show that has yet to reach farcical proportions. Only Elise Stempky is funny as Betty Boop-like Miss B., another member of David’s Bronx harem.

I loved Andy Hoag as a sour seen-it-all stage manager, but the usually brilliant David Andrews overacts a semi-charlatan stage actor-director. That is, until opening night - where too much is suddenly just right, where chaos is godly as Andrews, Roehrig, Nick Kittle, Tom Beverly and others grandly apply Murphy’s Law to an ill-starred production.

At one point an exasperated Andrews asks Roerhrig’s David, “Dammit, can’t you talk like a human being?” Who’d want to, when the alternative is so much funnier?

“Enter Laughing"continues at 8 p.m. tonight, Saturday and Nov. 14-16; and 2 p.m. Sunday ant Nov. 17; at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre Downtown, 408 W. Washington St. For reservations call (734) 971-2228.