If you’re looking for the perfect date night show—or just want a massive injection of laughs—then head over to the Hudson Theater for All In: Comedy About Love by Simon Rich, by far the happiest and cleverest evening on or Off-Broadway in many years. The advertising proclaims the cast will feature “different combinations of the funniest people on Earth.” That hyperbolic claim may be hard to verify, but author Simon Rich is definitely on the short list. His pieces and sketches have appeared in the New Yorker and on “Saturday Night Live,” and his witty vignettes here have the ingenuity of Woody Allen, with a gentler touch.
This is not an evening of Hallmark TV-movie rom-coms. The seven segments celebrate different forms of love in the most surprising ways. The format is simplicity itself, staged with a deft hand by Alex Timbers. The four cast members—comedian John Mulaney, “SNL” and “Portlandia” veteran Fred Armisen, Tony winner Renee Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton) and Drama Desk winner Richard Kind (The Big Knife) at the performance attended—are seated on comfy lounge chairs and narrate the various delightful love stories, all heavy on fantasy and satire. Lucy MacKinnon’s cartoonish video designs perfectly illustrate the tales which are punctuated by infectious rock-folk music by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, performed by Bengsons, whose lead singers are (appropriately) a married couple. David Korins’s warm-toned set resembles the lobby of a friendly ski lodge. The perfect place to spend a winter evening.
Mulaney starts the show off on the right quirky, off-kilter note with a monologue, “Guy Walks Into a Bar,” which is essentially a shaggy dog story about a hearing-impaired genie and a one-foot tall pianist. What begins as a hilarious one-note gag develops into a tender story of unexpected connection. There follows parodistic, yet well-observed stories on the love of parents, siblings, husbands and wives. Rich places contemporary conflicts in mismatched settings, creating bizarre jigsaw puzzle plots. A pair of pirates clash over how to raise an orphan stowaway. Should she be instilled with a defiance of land-loving convention or is an established sleep schedule more important? A Victorian physician grows insanely jealous when his wife spends too much time with his patient, the Elephant Man. Canines search for amour in the personal ads.
Sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch to fit the stories under the umbrella theme of love. “The Big Nap” is an extended spoof of film noir detective yarns as played out by a pair of toddlers. “A New Client” is a riff on Woody Allen’s “Death Knocks,” itself a goof on Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” only the Grim Reaper is distracted by a game of gin rummy rather than a chess match. In Rich’s iteration, Death has come to claim a has-been agent who manages to postpone his demise with promises of getting Death an interview with Martin Scorsese. Not exactly on topic. But it doesn’t matter; they’re all riotously funny.
Mulaney’s dry delivery precisely fits Rich’s sharp wit. Armisen has a marvelous time impersonating a pirate trying to be a daddy, Death shyly admitting he did Shakespeare in high school, and a sensitive Elephant Man. Kind is deliciously enraged as the jealous doctor and subtly crafty as the scheming agent. Goldsberry shines as a baby who can’t remember anything, the innocent pirate child, and the narrator of “History Report,” a dispatch from the future detailing how even a climate-challenged Earth itself is not as important as two people finding each other. A loving and sweet finish to a wondrous holiday treat.
