2006-01-28-billy

By Cynthia Citron

BEVERLY HILLS, California—A friend of mine told me that Billy Crystal’s “700 Sundays” was the best evening she’d ever spent in the theater. Poor girl, she obviously doesn’t get out much. But “spent” is the operative word here. Based on her recommendation, I spent $50 for a seat against the wall in the next-to-last row of the balcony of the humongous Wilshire Theater. (Her seat in the orchestra cost four times as much). From where I sat, Billy Crystal was a star shining from a faraway galaxy. Even with opera glasses he remained a fuzzy blur. My bad; I should have brought a telescope.

But at least I could hear him. And most of the time I could make out what he was saying. He tended to swallow his punch lines, so all over the theater you could hear people repeating them to their hearing-challenged seatmates. He also raced through his shticks at such a pace and such a pitch that I found the tension grating.

Most of the time, though, he was very funny. Grating, but ingratiating. He began with his birth, and hung the show around his family home in Long Beach, Long Island. An onstage replica of his house served as the backdrop for his stories and the focal point of his adventures.

Early on, he made a valid point: he said that there are only five relatives in the world, and they move from family to family. And when he showed photographs of his own relatives, everyone recognized them as their own uncles and aunts. Complete with awful hairdos, big ties, and grinning faces mugging for the camera. They could have been any ethnicity; in Billy's case, however, they were all Jewish.

His relatives, however, were more than a bit extraordinary: they were prominent movers and shakers in the world of jazz, and the greatest musicians of the time peopled Billy’s childhood. His stories about them were warm, evocative, and fascinating.

And then, when he was 15, his father died. It was sudden, traumatic, and frightening, and he relives his anger and his grief onstage. It’s a very moving piece, but it somehow feels manipulative: it feels like he’s trying too hard, like he’s dredged up the emotion too many times. That may seem like a harsh judgment of an event that obviously changed his life, but his telling of it goes on too long.

In fact, the whole show goes on too long. In two and a half hours there are too many people, too many stories. And more about Billy Crystal than we need to know.

“700 Sundays”, the amount of time he calculates that he spent with his hard-working father, will continue at the Wilshire Theater, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, through February 18th. If you don’t already have tickets, good luck. The show is just about sold out for the length of its run.