Our attitude toward the action might take its cue from what we take Sam to be. Won’t someone give Sam a break-from the calls and in his career? Won’t someone drop a food pellet to the poor creature on his dreadful treadmill? It’s still high energy, it’s still a lark, but now we’re apt to be more than a bit apprehensive about that man on the flying trapeze, so to speak. We see before us a kind of wonderfully choreographed chaos. ![]() The play, formerly a kind of high energy lark on the madness of multitasking (in the days before ubiquitous cellphones), has been updated a bit, so that Sam’s personal calls are on cell while the landlines are all for work. What’s more, the fact that restaurants are re-opening with much more limited seating makes vying for that one table by the window (or what have you) more anxious than ever. All within the realm of reality in Manhattan.Īnd that’s the fun of the play but also-now-its poignancy. And all of it is handled by Sam like a candle burning both ends while he also deals with a few matters on the home-front: his disarmingly sweet dad wants him home for Christmas, his acting friend is having a big break, and Sam is sweating out the wait for a potential callback at Lincoln Center. There’s the fussy French Maître D, the louche head chef-who sounds suspiciously at times like a certain overbearing political figure of our day-a co-worker calling in with MIA excuses, a wise guy, a big name actress’ manager, and a dizzying array of would-be clientele, some the height of pretentiousness, others the height of cluelessness. Music Theatre of Connecticut is one of very few theaters given the go-ahead by the state of CT and by Actor’s Equity to reopen, and MTC’s in-person seating has been shrunk to 25. Once upon a time people gathered in theaters and in restaurants, and you could pack both to capacity. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic that closed theaters last spring, the antics of Sam, an actor between roles who works on the reservation desk in the basement of a “world-renowned, ridiculously red-hot Manhattan restaurant,” comes freighted with not a little nostalgia. It was a canny reference to how context can change what we laugh at or not in a play that gently ribs a certain stratum of society. When Becky Mode’s comedy Fully Committed was playing on Broadway in 2016, critic Charles Isherwood of the New York Times quibbled about the changed attitude toward the kind of conspicuous consumption displayed at the ultra-exclusive restaurant featured in the play at the time as compared to 1999, when the play first ran at Vineyard Theater. ![]() Fully Committed, Music Theatre of Connecticut
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