Comedian Rip Taylor Offers Serious Reflection in It Ain't All Confetti

It Ain't All Confetti!
conceived and starring Rip Taylor
directed by David Galligan
El Portal Forum Theatre
extended through June 6

Comedian Rip Taylor has been entertaining audiences for over 50 years with a fast-paced delivery of stupid jokes and hysterical one-liners accompanied by a visual menagerie of props that won't quit. You really have to focus in to keep up with him; once he lets loose with a punchline, that's it; whether you caught it or not, it's on to the next, in a barrage of 50 or more, shot out and sprayed around in machine gun style. As Charles Pierce used to say, "I hope you're wearing pampers, my dear, because you're going to pee!" Taylor is a scream and audiences have always had a ball.
Now with It Ain't All Confetti!, Taylor stretches one hundred and eighty degrees as he delivers his life story in an 80 minute set, ingeniously directed by David Galligan. Taylor does his routine at the top for about ten minutes, then sits down, takes off the toupee and gets serious. He tells anecdotes from his sad childhood growing up in foster homes in D. C., as well as from his stint in the service and his very first gigs in clubs in war zones abroad and in strip joints back home. There is much humor, like in referring to his being drafted, "Can you imagine me defending you for two years?" or working for the first time as an entertainer in a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo, Japan, lip-syncing to Japanese songs. Watching his mobile face gyrate to the music is great fun. Or as he tries to get us to imagine tap-dancing Ann Miller as a nun in The Sound of Music, or as he elaborately describes an early ad for his act in burlesque: 27 Strips and Rip! There are laughs aplenty, but also some very emotionally jolting moments, like being thrown into a dark cellar as a child, beaten up and harrassed by bullies in high school, being unfairly thrown out into the street from his first gig in Atlantic City after the War, or his uneasy dismissal from TV's The Jackie Gleason Show by the Great One himself. There are resounding tributes to Eleanor Powell, with whom he did his first Vegas show, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, and more contemporary Demi Moore who became a close friend after he played her harsh boss in the film Indecent Proposal.
One memorable image that Taylor uses and reuses is the concept of moving into the light, a warm and secure place to be - that he found early on in show business while appearing in an amateur piano contest. It's a steady reminder to struggling performers that you can and must find your own way to survive. He did and has never stopped working all these years onstage or screen.
Taylor never slows down or changes speed during the storytelling; you have to strain sometimes to understand everything he says, but it's OK, because he insists on keeping his audience consistently on their toes. He may not be a classically trained actor, but is certainly one of the funniest second bananas of his generation who knows how to move us.
This is a very entertaining, enlightening and touching piece, whose anecdotes are perfect for a best-selling autobiography. Taylor proves himself even more endearing with an honest repartee that makes us simultaneously laugh and cry.

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