Backstage West Review

Setup & Punch

Reviewed by Les Spindle

MAY 20, 2009

PHOTO CREDIT RICK BAUMGARTNER Cross They're Playing Our Song with Will & Grace and stir in hip seriocomic undercurrents oozing with up-to-the-minute relevance. The result is Mark Saltzman's deliriously funny and surprisingly touching world-premiere play, revolving around a Rubik's Cube of crisscrossing motivations that prove all's fair in love, war, and fervent showbiz ambitions. It's hard to recall a play that explored the crazy world of driven creative artists this incisively or one with such a fresh and savvy view of sexual politics in the 21st century. Director Daniel Henning and three pitch-perfect actors draw us into the giddy fun, then sock us in the solar plexus with the rueful emotional reality at the play's core. Platonic chums Brian (Andrew Leeds) and Vanya (Hedy Burress) are struggling to make it as a Broadway songwriting team, beautifully established in an audition song that sends up the styles of Sondheim, Webber, and others. (Four terrific original songs by Berton Averre and Rob Meurer are sprinkled into the story.) Throwing a monkey wrench into this promising partnership is their collaboration with a narcissistic rock idol, Jan (P.J. Griffith, sporting leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, skintight jeans, and a prima donna attitude). Starting with a flashback structure, as letters and emails are exchanged years after Brian and Vanya have gone their separate ways, the story explores what went sour in their relationship and whether a fresh start could be in the offing. As the sexy wildcard joining the budding songwriting duo, Griffith creates the most delightfully deranged parody of a singing sex god since the Conrad Birdie character swiveled his hips in Bye Bye Birdie. Griffith gobbles the scenery in a couple of sidesplitting songs and serves as a sizzling catalyst for the sexual intrigues that follow. The excellent Leeds brings hilarity and depth to the role of the closeted tunesmith Brian, and Burress matches him with her witty and forceful portrayal of a woman with possibly more up her sleeves than meets the eye. Design elements are exemplary, and the fast-paced 105-minute show passes by in a flash. This is among Henning's finest projects to date. Presented by the Blank Theatre Company at the 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd.,Hollywood. May 14–June 21. Thu.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (Also Tue.–Wed., 8 p.m. May 12–13.)  (323) 661-9827 or www.theblank.com. Direct Link

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LA Times Review

Critic's Choice!

Review: 'Setup & Punch' at Second Stage Theatre

5:30 PM, May 20, 2009

Freud said it all comes down to love and work, but didn’t mention what to do when the two collide head-on. That’s the premise of Mark Saltzman’s droll new comedy, “Setup & Punch” — double entendre intended. Featuring four songs by the Knack’s Berton Averre and keyboardist Rob Meurer, theBlank Theatre Co.’s deft three-hander is a kind of “Will and Grace” meets “The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Performed on a near-bare stage, “Setup” follows the epistolary rapprochement of an estranged songwriting team. The back story: Brian (Andrew Leeds) and Vanya (Hedy Burress) meet at Cornell in a comic zone somewhere between Noel Coward and Encyclopedia Brown. He’s closeted, she likes unavailable men, and that tension fuels a spirited creative partnership. But things get tricky when they’re hired to collaborate with indie rocker Jan (P.J. Griffith), who has an insidious way of exposing ids.

Emmy-winner Saltzman, who wrote the screenplay for the cult favorite “The Adventures of Milo and Otis,” understands the dynamics of the buddy genre, and the evening is at its best in the moment-by-moment badinage between Brian and Vanya. Like well-matched tennis players, they volley ideas with fleet wit. Under Daniel Henning’s punchy direction, Leeds and Burress find every nuance in Saltzman’s jokes; with her mobile face, Burress seems born for screwball. Griffith plays well off the duo’s repression, particularly in a subway scene where Jan undresses Brian for a party.

The show’s few songs haven’t quite found an integral relationship to the script, and the music misses the chance to push the play into something richer and more expressive. The best number follows the saga of two musical theater lovers too shy to hook up, satirizing Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim along the way.  (I wanted to hear a cut from the team’s oft-referenced hit show, “Fairy Tale Court.”)

The last third of the play loses its focus, and you wish Saltzman could find a less L.A.-plot turn than a pitch at HBO. The material, clearly autobiographical, might need to move one more step away from its real-life inspiration.  Still, “Setup” makes the point that joy can be person-specific. Painfully so. That source of delight may leave your life, but the longing for what he or she brings out in you never does.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

“Setup & Punch” Second Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.  8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $22-$28. (323) 661-9827. Running time: 90 minutes.

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Nine years following her acrimonious split from Brian, Vanya (nee Yvonne Patricia) takes pen to paper to write (yes, write, not email) her onetime creative partner with a request. “Dear Brian,” she writes.  “I know I can’t make up with you put I hope we can be friends.” 

Thus begins Setup & Punch, Mark Saltzman’s funny, tuneful, touching, and unpredictable look at a friendship that went sour—and one friend’s attempt to reconnect years later. Told in present time with frequent flashbacks to earlier, happier times, this comedy with songs showcases a charismatic, talented trio of actors—Hedy Burress as Vanya, Andrew Leeds as Brian, and P.J. Griffith as Jan, the rock musician whose arrival in the pair’s lives changed everything between them.  Directed with accustomed imagination and panache by Daniel Henning, Setup & Punch proves yet another winner from the Blank Theatre Company.

Brian, now a successful Hollywood screenwriter happily coupled with a man named Cooper, and Vanya, perhaps not quite so contentedly married to a lawyer who just doesn’t get her jokes like Brian did, first meet during their years at Cornell.  (They chose the university for its high suicide rate, a sure sign of a school with a good theater arts department.) Then a geeky eager-beaver of a girl whose sunny attitude towards life would make Pollyanna seem positively gloomy by comparison, Vanya falls head over heels in love with this equally nerdy but decidedly more cynical young Jewish lad from the moment she sees him take a bow at the end of a college performance.  The two click right from the start, and continue to throughout most of their friendship and song-writing collaboration. In fact, there’s only one hitch as far as romance is concerned, and that is the teensy-weensy matter of Brian’s sexual orientation, though since he remains deeply closeted at college, it’s easy for Vanya to convince herself of the potential for more than friendship to bloom between them, if only she is patient.

When the opportunity arises for the two fledgling songwriters to put their talents together for a musical revue, the result is a hilarious ditty entitled “Show Tune Hearts.”  Boy and girl meet cute on a subway, and before you know it, their voices are raised in song, first in Kander and Ebb mode, then a la Disney (“Little birds will braid my hair”), then in the style of Andrew Lloyd Webber circa Phantom, and finally in Sondheim fashion in his Company phase (“Being alive is being alone”).

The host of the revue, Howard Pfeiffer, likes the pair’s lyrics, but their music not so much, and so he sets them up with Jan, a composer of Top 40 hits who is known as “the rock-and-roll sex god from Santa Cruz.”  Said hunk shows up in true cocky rock-star attitude and attire, telling the eccentrically garbed Vanya “I like the way you dress. You take a lot of chances. A sort of Minnie Mouse meets Czech whore.”  As to whether he writes words or music first, Jan tells Brian, “The ‘groove.’”  Our young closet-case hero is smitten from first hello.

Jan proves the catalyst for the duo’s songwriting success, but also, eventually, for the dissolution of their friendship, or as a still bitter Brian puts it, “the day I got my pink slip from you.”

As letters turn to emails (they’re faster) and then to IMs (faster still) and finally to phone calls, Brian and Vanya relive the past, she eager to forgive and forget, he in a far less conciliatory mood.  Wasn’t it her own fault that she kept seeing him in a romantic light? Couldn’t she intuit that he was gay, even back in his closeted days? “I knew and simultaneously did not know,” Vanya tells him now, years later.

Will old feelings prove strong enough for Brian to forgive and forget, or are past wounds simply too deep to ever heal?

Those expecting a predictable resolution to Brian and Vanya’s story may be in for a surprise, as sweetness comes laced with a touch of cyanide in Saltzman’s tasty, tangy treat.  The playwright, a 6-time Emmy winner for his work on Sesame Street, knows how to be funny in one sentence (a gay man who loves musical theater is called a “show-mo”) and biting in the next (Brian tells Vanya, “Anyone who knows me knows not to mention you.”) and then touching in the next (Vanya tells Brian, “There is a certain way I’m joyful and it only happens with you.”).

Henning couldn’t have come up with a better cast to bring Setup & Punch to life.  Burress (she’s “Setup” to Brian’s “Punch”) is a marvelous comedienne with the same quirky likeability that made Gilda Radner a star, whether in manic mode or aching over the still “naked wound” that is her love for Brian.  Leeds matches Burress every step of the way, combining cynicism (the perfect antidote to Vanya’s perkiness) and nerdy charm.  Both are talented singers (their “Show Tune Hearts” is almost worth the price of admission), and Leeds (who at thirteen played Jason in the original Broadway cast of Falsettos) does a fine job on the piano as well. Completing the trio is the sexy, charismatic Griffith, whose musical theater credits (including Sky in the First National Tour of Mamma Mia) and rock credentials (he’s fronted three different bands) make him the perfect Jan, as exciting vocally as he is as an actor. Scenes in which the sexually ambiguous rocker/songwriter attempts to loosen up the tightly-wound Brian (which include pulling off Brian’s sweater and unbuttoning his shirt, the better to show the world some skin) positively crackle with sexual tension. Griffith also appears briefly and to good effect as Miguel, a young Mexican priest who encourages his friend Brian to reconcile with Vanya.

Henning, working with set designer Ian P. Garrett and lighting designer R. Christopher Stokes keeps the action moving lickety-split from present to past and then back again, the Blank’s split-level stage’s upper level serving as a New York City subway stop while below, stacks of boxes painted to resemble Manhattan skyscrapers serve as various other locales.  Michael Mullen’s costumes are a delight, from Jan’s tight jeans, chains, and leather, to Brian’s button-down shirts and khakis, to past-tense Vanya’s wild, unconventional outfits (one has her looking like a canary-yellow Alice In Wonderland with fire engine red stockings) to her somewhat more subdued contemporary wear.  Warren Davis’ sound design works well too, mixing live piano with prerecorded tracks for the show’s four catchy, clever original songs (by Berton Averre and Rob Meurer).

Ultimately, Setup & Punch is about the complexities of friendship, sexual identity, and love, and about the need we all feel to be (and to stand up for) who we are. Brian and Vanya learn life lessons over the course of the play’s ten years (told in 90 fast-moving minutes), entertaining the audience every step of the way. The Blank has followed Speech & Debate and The Jazz Age with yet another winner, and finishes its 2009 season on a high note indeed.

The Blank 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood. Through May 14. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00.    Reservations: 323 661-9827   www.TheBlank.com

--Steven Stanley
May 21, 2009

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LA Weekly review

NEW REVIEW GO SETUP & PUNCH Director Daniel Henning seamlessly moves the action between the past and the present in Mark Saltzman's highly original new comedy. After a bitter ten year breakup with former writing partner Vanya (Hedy Burress), Brian (Andrew Leeds) contacts her about the copyright to a children's show they co produced. Through a series of letters, the breakup of the once happy writing duo is laid bare. The two met at Cornell, and Vanya followed Brian to New York City to kick start his Broadway aspirations. They audition for a revue, but are told to collaborate with Jan (a mesmerizing P.J. Griffith), a rock star and composer. As the twosome becomes a threesome, Vanya's unrequited love for Brian, a deeply closeted gay man, spills through. Jan, a sexual libertine, opens the closet door for Brian, however. The sexual tension is one contributing factor to Vanya and Brian's break-up, but when Vanya is hired for a TV series they had both been working on, Brian goes ballistic. All of this is revealed through a series of letters which become emails which become phone calls as the two draw near a rapprochement. Performed without an intermission, Henning keeps the action moving at a brisk pace, even as the two compose letters. Griffith also performs in the smaller role of Miguel, a once raucous Cornell classmate who has diverged onto a spiritual path. Second Stage Theatre, Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru June 21. (323) 661-9827. A Blank Theatre Company production (Sandra Ross)

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Stage Happenings dot com Review

by Robert Machray

The Blank Theatre Company can always be depended on to bring its audiences new challenging work. Some highlights from past seasons include Dickie and Babe: The Truth About Leopold and Loeb, Lobster Alice, Chess, and Wild Party.  Setup & Punch is the latest offering, written by Mark Saltzman who wrote Mrs. Claus (starring Angela Lansbury), Clutter (at The Colony Theatre), The Tin Pan Alley Rag (soon to open at The Roundabout in New York), A My Name Is Alice (co-author), and a winner of seven Emmy Awards for his work on Sesame Street and The Muppets. His latest venture with The Blank is a play with music (Berton Averre and Rob Meurer) that tells the tale of a Broadway song-writing duo whose relationship ends bitterly when they collaborate with a “sex-god singer composer of a cutting edge rock band “. Egos, sexual desires, and ambitions collide.

The piece covers a lot of ground, what it means to collaborate, pitfalls of collaboration, conflicts of style and intentions, and personal relationships. Brian (Andrew Leeds) is forever wounded because his ex- partner Vanya (Heddy Burress) persuades him to get in touch one more time for old time sake only to relive the pain of losing her. Both it seems had an affair with the rocker and it wasn’t revealed until now. In the play they go through what happens only to emerge on the other side with a better understanding of themselves and each other. They have a loving relationship but just can't be together because they both need someone or something else. Along the way we get to see a routine they wrote together and then a song about subways, sung by the rocker, which is the best song of the lot. The performers are all good. Ms Buress and Mr. Leeds have an easy professional relationship with the audience. Mr. P.J. Griffiths give a bravura performance as the rocker.

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Theater: The Blank Theatre
Web Site: http://www.theblank.com/
Tickets: (323) 661 9827
Dates: Through June 21, 2009.

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