Review: THE LOST CELLPHONE WEEKEND at Brickhouse Theater

Addiction is a kick as well as a beast. Maybe it’s a kicked beast. Less amusing - and a bit unjust for a musical with high hopes - is the reaction to said kicked best, when that reaction is the sound of applause in a room with an audience of around seven people, but that’s a topic for later.

LOST CELLPHONE WEEKEND takes a clever premise – the reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1945 film THE LOST WEEKEND, replacing it with cellphone/internet addiction and setting it to music – and has a lot of fun with the endeavor. Write Act Repertory is staging the West Coast premiere of Stephen Gilbane’s musical at the Brickhouse Theatre, and boy could this production use some audiences! The production, like the play, is a mixed bag featuring a handful of enthusiastic and engaging performances, particularly by the female cast members. Chamber piece though CELLPHONE WEEKEND very much is, director Darrin Yalacki’s production would benefit from some slightly higher production values (at the very least, a functioning table on which to rest a typewriter), and certainly a few more butts in the seats.

Our hero is a slightly neurotic writer named Jake (played by Scott Di Lorenzo) who tries pitifully to connect with his teen-age daughter, Peanut (Courtney South) only to find her too engaged with TikTok to give dear old dad any attention. Simultaneously demoralized and inspired, Jake calls up his former producing partner Stan (Trevor Murphy) and decides to write a musical which he envisions to be a hard-hitting indictment of cell-phone technology. Coming from Jake and Stan, the team that gave the world Al Qaeda Now, Al Kinda Wow: The Taliban Follies,” we can sorta kinda expect the new output to put song and dance over razor-edged satire, but there you have it.

The hook: Jake’s framework is THE LOST WEEKEND, and he basically updates all of the film’s characters to fit the cell phone addition plot. So His Ray Milland stand-in, the noirish Don Birnam (Lance Bagley) is spending a romantic, distraction-free weekend in a quaint little town in Vermont with his fiancée Helen (Jess Spruiell), a burg that has no functioning internet. Anywhere. In any way. Which is by design because Helen thinks Don has a problem and hopes the weekend will help him kick it.  Accordingly, Don, who is more urgently in need of a message-checking or picture-posting fix that he will ever comfortably admit, spends a desperate couple of days trying to figure out a way to get himself online.

Along the way, Don and Helen encounter an assortment of femme fatales, enabling storekeepers, all-knowing bartenders and other types. Helen goes shopping for alpaca scarves and succumbs to some vices of her own (because, you know, addiction). The action bounces between Jake/Stan/Peanut and the Don-Helen plot he’s spinning. Although Jake’s the guy who will eventually come to a reckoning, his story is less interesting and a bit schtick-filled, sucking up time to fill out an already thin 85-minute tale.

Gillbane’s songs are nothing if not witty and the best ones are delivered by Don and the women in his bonkers orbit. Lauren Faulkner vamps deliciously as a mobile app developer on whom Don tries to put the squeeze…for her phone of course. Spruiell gives Helen a mixture of tenderness and spirit. And when not in petulant daughter mode, South is a scene-stealer as a shady back alley pusher vaudeville-ing her way through the high-energy song “Quite Important Person.” Accompanist Grace Balint keeps pace and then some with the play’s nine numbers.  

As the play’s separately tormented heroes, Di Lorenzo and Bagley are both serviceable. Bagley’s Don evokes a bit of Bogey, and he believably lays on the charm and desperation when the need arises. Di Lorenzo employs a shambling charisma. We can buy that our playwright hero is a bit tormented, but of course it’s Bagley who gets to play that torture out in the most entertaining manner. Jake’s biggest hurdle – at least at the performance viewed by this critic – was keeping upright a misbehaving table, which only had three working legs.

Kudos certainly to Gillbane for crafting a sly homage both against addictive habits and in favor of live theater  - a venue in which those habits can be pushed aside.

LOST CELLPHONE WEEKEND plays through April 27 at 10950 Peach Grove St., NOrth Hollywood.

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