Crystal in Clover

Funny people tend to hail from unfunny places. Comics all seem to learn their trade as a way to avoid getting stuffed into a locker, or to make Ma stop clubbing Pa with the shotgun.The story Billy Crystal tells in “700 Sundays,” his autobiographical solo play, is weirdly free of such pathologies. From early in life, he showed a knack for entertaining people. Showbiz folklore would attribute this skill to a stage mother, possessed of a Prussian sense of discipline, who began drilling the boy in the womb. In fact, Mr. Crystal was exposed to some funny people, and received plenty of encouragement from a kind and loving family. Aside from grandpa’s lethal, copious flatulence, his boyhood was about as peaceful as they come.Yet “700 Sundays” pleases, not because Mr. Crystal’s story is always entrancing, but because Mr. Crystal himself tells it. He’s not breaking new comic ground here – civilization probably has all the circumcision jokes it needs, thank you – but just about every punchline lands. Brief excursions into other characters, particularly his relatives, tend to sing. He’s a funny man and this is a funny show.In Des McAnuff’s admirably focused production, Mr. Crystal delivers his reminiscences in front of a model of his boyhood home. (Eminem did the same on one of his tours, to different effect.) Growing up on Long Island, Mr. Crystal spent every Sunday with his brothers and his father. The title alludes to Jack Crystal’s sudden death when Billy was just 15. By Mr. Crystal’s calculation, that gave them 700 Sundays together, “not a lot of time for a kid to have with his dad.”Mr. Crystal calls his father his “first hero,” an honor that he doesn’t hesitate to spread around. Grandpa with the gas issues is a hero, too, and so is nutty Aunt Sheila. (She lives in Boca Raton, which is not so very heroic, but accepts her gay daughter, which is.) Mr. Crystal laces the family reminiscence with some deflationary tactics. Early in the show he says he wouldn’t trade his family for any other: “They’re lunatics.” But from one end to the other, all the nostalgia threatens to turn the show into a pricey episode of “The Wonder Years.”It avoids this first because Mr. Crystal doesn’t hail from just any old mid-century American family. Am I the last guy in town to learn that his uncle is Milt Gabler? I like Mr. Crystal fine – “When Harry Met Sally” and so on – but Milt Gabler? He founded Commodore Records, one of the premier jazz labels. In the 1930s and ’40s he produced many tracks by the greats, including Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a song nobody else would touch. Here’s a hero.Some of the best stretches in Mr. Crystal’s show are his boyhood memories of hanging out at the Commodore Music Store on East 42nd Street. He went to the movies with Holiday and palled around with Zutty Singleton and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Sure, he’s name-dropping like mad, but why shouldn’t he? He’s got one of his own: The fact that Roy “Little Jazz” Eldridge bestowed upon young Billy the name “Littlest Jazz” strikes me as by far the highlight of his career.The other reason Mr. Crystal’s show doesn’t resemble a “Wonder Years” style nostalgia bath is less harmonious. The schmaltz in this show makes Kevin Arnold’s voiceovers seem scandalously outre. In the gauze emporium of Mr. Crystal’s mind, Manhattan is “the Emerald City.” A description of his first trip to Yankee Stadium is accompanied by some strings from the Ken Burns collection, which form a kind of sepia haze at the front of the stage. At points the emotional exposure is actually difficult to watch. Mr. Crystal relives the night his father died, and his mother’s stroke, moments of sheer bathos. What kind of person can stand onstage and tell a thousand strangers these things eight times a week? Who would do it even once? Did I really just hear a sincere use of the phrase “laughter through tears”?The puzzle of this show is why it pitches into self-congratulation. Looking back on his life so far, Mr. Crystal takes the metaphor of playing the hand you’re dealt to its absurd literal extreme. He mimes a poker game with God, in which he reads off cards one by one, weighing whether he would change key elements of his life. Majestically he says he wouldn’t change anything, thereby confirming, for an audience possibly unable to suss this out on its own, that, yes, it is pretty all right to be a famous, beloved, and wealthy celebrity, with a family not out of place in Hallmark copy. As Mr. Crystal finished this bit (center stage, hands on hips, gazing defiantly into middle distance), the crowd erupted in applause. I, too, was moved. To retch.In a lesser show, maybe these lapses wouldn’t jar. Mr. Crystal, his director, and Alan Zweibel (who is credited with “additional material”) have managed to turn autobiography into dramatic structure – no easy feat. The photos and bits of old film projected on the house are well chosen, especially the one that isn’t really a film. At one point Mr. Crystal introduces a clip of a family barbecue, then acts out the jerky, silent motion of someone manning a grill on an 8-mm film. After so much sharp, hilarious work, it hurts me to see Mr. McAnuff end the show by turning the stage into a sky full of stars.But the crowd, apparently not sharing my distaste for stale cheese, remained boisterous throughout. When Mr. Crystal dipped into music nostalgia (“Remember records? Don’t you miss records?”), a few people clapped. “Yes!” said the woman behind me. I had a wager going with my friend that Mr. Crystal would find a way to sneak a “When Harry Met Sally” reference into his show, and everybody would applaud, and he would look surprised. Actually Mr. Crystal’s career highlights go gratifyingly unmentioned. Much of the spontaneous applause comes when he describes his varsity basketball days: native New Yorkers can’t resist clapping when they hear the names of their alma maters. At the Broadhurst, a local boy is making pretty good.Until March 6 (235 W. 44th Street, 212-239-6200).

Crystal in Clover

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