Review: Hub Theatre Company's BUYER & CELLAR is fun look at a funny lady

In her nightclub act, the late Debbie Reynolds did an impersonation of Barbra Streisand, complete with a prosthetic nose, and at the end of it, Reynolds would laugh and tell her audience, “Barbra hasn’t seen that yet.”

That may also be true of the one-person comedy “Buyer & Cellar,” whose tongue-in-cheek tag line is “For Legal Reasons, Not a True Story,” but if the iconic singer decides it’s time for her to see playwright Jonathan Tolins’s wickedly funny 2013 play – which had its Boston premiere at the Lyric Stage Company in 2015 – about her private Malibu mall and her myriad eccentricities, then she should head straight to Boston’s Club Café, where the Hub Theatre Company of Boston is presenting a laugh-out-loud mounting of the show through August 1.

The comedy centers on Alex More – the role originated in New York by Michael Urie and being played in Boston by Victor L. Shopov – a struggling L.A.-based gay actor who learns the hard way that Disneyland is not always the happiest place on earth when the theme park lets him go from his position as a costumed character.

When Alex moves from Walt’s Magic Kingdom to Barbra’s single-shopper mall, things seem to be looking up. After all, Streisand has just published her 2010 coffee-table tome about her sprawling Malibu estate, “My Passion for Design,” for which she wrote the copy and took most of the photographs, and is looking to hire someone to staff the shopping mall beneath her barn.

As Alex soon sees for himself, there’s not a chain store in sight – it’s all Barbra all the time in Victorian-style shoppes displaying her vast collections of dolls, movie costumes, hats, evening wear, and highbrow bric-a-brac. There’s also a frozen yogurt shop, for when the lady of the manor craves a sweet treat with sprinkles on top.

In addition to playing Alex, Shopov – an in-demand voiceover artist – also voices several other characters including Alex’s anxiety-ridden beau, Barry, a middling screenwriter who has encyclopedic knowledge of Streisand’s life and legend; Sharon, Streisand’s gravel-throated estate manager who is adept at both issuing orders and unruffling feathers; and, of course, the onetime funny girl turned funny lady, and now mall owner, herself. In one scene, Shopov’s Alex uses his best “I loved you when I was a little girl” routine to charm Streisand’s unseen husband, James Brolin, sent to the cellar on a covert mission by his wife.

Under the quick-paced, knowing direction of Daniel Bourque, and with expert scenic and projection design by Justin Lahue and mood-setting lighting by Rachael Hamed, the subject seldom veers off Streisand, but when it does, Shopov is right there to deliver hilarious asides about everyone from Doris Roberts and Dee Wallace Stone to Bea Arthur, while still keeping his character’s snark at a simmer.

Streisand’s needy self-absorption elicits laughs, too. Increasingly loyal Alex briefly returns to terra firma while watching Streisand’s 1996 film “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” which has the diva, as a college professor, dating characters played by Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Bridges while Lauren Bacall, as her long-suffering mother, shares tales of woe and heaps praise on Streisand with, as Tolins so accurately puts it, “the terrified sincerity of a hostage video.”

Not too long after he has begun pushing away Barry and others in favor of a real friendship with the singer of “People” – who it turns out may not really need people – Alex finds himself on what will be his farewell tour of Streisand’s home, overwhelmed by the museum-like aesthetic and feeling “like a fly being swatted by old copies of Architectural Digest.”

Shopov – a multi-Elliot Norton and IRNE award winner – shows once again that he is one of Boston’s truly fine actors. Having appeared in “Bad Jews” at SpeakEasy Stage, “Death of a Salesman” and “33 Variations” at Lyric Stage, plus “Boys in the Band,” “The Normal Heart,” and “Punk Rock” with Zeitgeist Stage Company, Shopov has also starred in Hub Theatre Company productions including “Burn This,” “True West,” and “Art.” With “Buyer & Cellar,” he proves that while dramas are his forte, his comedy chops can also more than carry the day.

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