Review: Leave It to Beverly by DA! Theatre Collective
by Michael Meigs
Kirk German's Leave It to Beverly is a rib-tickler. His characters and cast go sailing off into TV Land of the 1950s and 1960s, taking the gags and the mannerisms way up over the top. DA! applies its energetic young 21st-century humor to Mom and Pop's naive entertainments and comes away a winner.
Consider, for example, canned laughter. The early days of television featured many programs filmed before live audiences, but with rising costs and the introduction of video tape, producers were happy to sweeten audience reactions or do away with them entirely by using "laugh tracks." A single eccentric artist, Charlie Douglas, pretty much had the monopoly of that business through the 1960s, thanks to his "laff box," a complicated non-computerized device.
German's opening episode "Leave It to Beverly" features our dear housewife Beverly, newly a mother of twins, and Husband, a big, genial horned-rim-glasses-wearing avatar of Robert Young. Author and actors satirize the saccharine and the silliness of those classic sitcoms, in an acting style both coy and twinkling, and the action is regularly interrupted by roars of recorded laughter.
Beverly and her girlfriends become somewhat flustered by this unexplained punctuation of their lives. Eventually, after "Trixie Knows Best," the knock-off of both Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the girls discover great big tins resembling 2-gallon Campbell's soup containers, labeled "HA.HA.HA." Within them is a gelatinous colored substance that has got to be the canned laughter that permeates their existence. How it got there and the reason for it are enigmas that are solved in the final, post-intermission episode, "Make Room for Lorraine."
A Brief Digression
Austin has been fertile ground for this sort of humor lately. The improv-driven Institution Theatre has been running Sunday-night recreations of episodes of the 1990's television comedy Saved by the Bell for several months, and a group of scamps over at the City Theatre are doing two weekends of He-Man, Live! drawn from the 1980s cartoon adventures of some Mattel toy figures. So it seems only fair that my generation -- the gramps generation, many of us -- should get our own fix of sitcom satire, courtesy of creative young adults who found our early collective popular amusements impossibly shallow.
Wikipedia's lengthy article on laugh tracks, an impressive essay in cultural history, winds up with a quote from television historian Ben Glenn:
"Today’s sitcoms are based mostly on witty reparté and no longer rely on outlandish situations or sight gags, such as you would see in an episode of Mister Ed or The Munsters or Bewitched — and today’s muted laughs reflect that. Generally, laughs are now much less aggressive and more subdued; you no longer hear unbridled belly laughs or guffaws. It's 'intelligent' laughter—more genteel, more sophisticated. But definitely not as much fun. There was an optimism and carefree quality in those old laugh tracks. Today, the reactions are largely 'droll' just the way in which they sound.
"In the past, if the audience was really having a good time, it shone through. Audience members seemed less self-conscious and they felt free to laugh as loudly as they wanted. Maybe that's a reflection of contemporary culture."
End of Digression
My wife Karen loved the show -- both for the clever, zany humor and for the stimulating reality that this DA! version is entirely an Austin product. "Everybody should go to see it!"
The familiar and welcome DA! crowd is involved. Favorites for this outing are Jude Hickey (a fabulous milkman and an even funnier counsel to Lisa del Rosario playing Trixie the genie), Heather Huggins as the titular Beverly, and Michelle Brandt both incognito and cognito. Scott Roskilly is a muscular yellow bundle of fun as the Norwegian, Sven. Lisa del Rosario is cute as a button herself (especially with the magic summons: a finger to the nose and a rump wiggle) and her choreography is so zippily 50s and 60s that everyone should be wearing capri pants for it.
Stephanie Denson as Minerva raises her eyebrows from the first at all this sweet-as-pie stuff. She's a funny and successful subverter of the status quo.
Jacob Trussell from St. Ed's fits nicely into this clowning and into his army uniform. A gramps-like admonition, however -- he needs rank insignia on his uniform, and the Army doesn't use the rank of "commander" (that's Navy parlance). His character would be a captain or major, as was Air Force flyboy & astronaut Anthony Nelson (Larry Hagman) in I Dream of Jeannie.
So would you enjoy it?
Duh! Definitely, DA! (cue laughter, applause. . . .)
Review by Olin Meadows at AustinOnStage.com, November 11
Review by Robert Faires in Austin Chronicle, November 12
Review by Spike Gillespie at austinist.com, November 20
EXTRA
Click to view program for Leave It to Beverly by DA! Theatre Collective
Hits as of 2015 03 01: 2128
Leave It to Beverly
by Kirk German
DA! Theatre Collective
2211-A Hidalgo Street
near Robert Martinez and E. 7th Street, behind Joe's Bakery
Austin, TX, 78702
