Fish In the Dark is the new comedy written by Larry David, the creator and star of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and co-creator of "Seinfeld." Fish In the Dark is directed by Anna D. Shapiro and marks Tony-winner Jason Alexander's Broadway return and features Jayne Houdyshell, Jake Cannavale, Jonny Orsini, Rosie Perez, and Jerry Adler.
It's the pesky little things that make up Larry David's infinitely expandable comic universe. All those petty grievances and minor disputes, the slights and slips, the miscues and forced apologies -- so flustering in our own lives, so hilarious in his...This gift for stringing together minuscule moments of frustration and fury...is ideally suited to the small screen. On the stage, however, the smallness and the shtickiness are clumsily magnified, as 'Fish in the Dark'...uncomfortably reveals...This is an overextended sitcom that would like to become a farce but settles instead for some hoary Neil Simon middle ground. There are laughs, to be sure...But stretched out over the length of about three and a half episodes of 'Curb,' the show huffs and puffs its way to the finish line like a geriatric marathoner wheeling an oxygen tank behind him. It's not surprising that David's playwriting inexperience would show. What is astonishing is that the production would compound the problem by obediently following David's lead instead of channeling his comic instincts in a more theatrical direction.
The Seinfeld creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star's venture into new found territory at age 67 has clearly intrigued an avid public, but is the play itself any good? Possibly, if you want to watch a celebrity from one medium reprise material from another: a 'pretty ... pretty' reference arrives late in the second act to cheers from an adoring crowd fully au fait with its TV provenance. Others may wonder whether so scattershot a piece of writing would have got this far without its physically rangy, bespectacled star attached. On stage, David's Norman Drexel forever looks as if he's going to teeter backwards, his notably large hands sawing the air for comic effect...The narrative moves on from the familial rancour that often attends funerals to a rampant smuttiness that exists in deliberately dubious taste...There are jokes about balls and boobs, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Gaza, the second of which brings down the house. But for every line that sticks...numerous others don't...Perhaps it's left to Fish in the Dark to suggest that this is our adulthood: one mean-spirited, sour gag or situation after another -- in which case please pass the beef.
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