All In: Comedy About Love Broadway Reviews

You might assume that Simon Rich’s Broadway debut, “All In,” whose subtitle promises “Comedy About Love,” would join this honor roll. But this new production is a slight affair that’s as easy to forget as it is to watch. Theatergoers likely to get the most mileage out of the show’s 90 minutes at the Hudson Theater are those who bust a gut reading The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section — they must exist, right? — where some of this material has appeared.

The show is not a comedy per se, but an anthology of comedy writing: short humor pieces by Simon Rich, performed script-in-hand by a rotating cast of actors. And while all of these pieces touch on awkward modern love in some way, that love is not always romantic; it can also be parental or familial or universal. But although the stories tend to resolve on awww-inspiring notes, All In is first and foremost funny—often very, very funny.

Well, at the Broadway show “All In: Comedy About Love,” the audience does the very same with their hard-earned money — and loses big-time. Ticket-buyers are being charged as much as $800 a pop some weeks for what is little more than a sedate staged reading of New Yorker cartoon captions uttered by celebrities.

I hate to be a Grinch at Christmas, but it’s not a good sign when your Broadway show has more than one Reddit thread asking if it’s a scam. So things currently stand for Simon Rich’s All In: Comedy About Love. Bothered by the lack of indefinite article there? I hear you, but alas, for All In to qualify as a comedy about love, it would actually have to be a play. Instead, it’s an expensive staged reading with a rotating cast of celebrities.

“All In,” which will feature a rotating series of stage and screen stars during its limited run — Mr. Mulaney is currently joined by Fred Armisen, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Richard Kind — consists of a series of vignettes adapted from Mr. Rich’s stories, and their general sensibility exists at the intersection of “SNL” and the New Yorker. Varying in length from short and sweet to overextended, they’re literate, irreverent, and goofy in that knowing way one associates with the kind of bright, impeccably educated young men (and sometimes women) who find success writing for late-night television shows and prestigious magazines.

All four actors sit on chairs facing the audience, playing a gallery of different characters featured in each story, such as the little boy in “The Big Nap” imagining himself as the put-upon Chandler-esque gumshoe, surveying dark shadows and malign intent everywhere, while Rich makes clear to the audience it’s the little boy’s grandma just taking care of him and his baby sister Zoe (Goldsberry) while their parents are away: “We still don’t know why Mama and Dada went away this weekend, or where they went, or what they did there. We don’t know why they go to work, or what work is, or why they both have glasses.”

There’s a cozy ease that permeates “All In,” in which a rotating cast of celebs narrates, with both flourish and offhandedness, the humorous and offbeat essays of The New Yorker writer Simon Rich. It’s the kind of comic comfort that easily fits into the holiday period but also into a Broadway season that is especially welcoming to laughter.

Then I actually saw All In, and count me among the Rich converts. Directed by the ever nimble Alex Timbers and performed by a rotating cast of four actors – I was lucky to get the truly excellent John Mulaney, Fred Armisen, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Richard Kind – the 90-minute All In is a perfect holiday snickerdoodle, a light and tasty snack no less funny for its brevity and lack of splashy production values.

Yes, the show is not “a” comedy, meaning an actual play, but rather a collection of short humorous pieces written by Simon Rich (son of former New York Times theater critic Frank), read by a rotating quartet of well-known performers. The current stars are comedian John Mulaney (certainly the show’s biggest draw), veteran character actor Richard Kind, Tony-winner Renee Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton), and actor-writer-musician Fred Armisen, who, like Mulaney and Rich, is a Saturday Night Live veteran. Among the stars appearing later in the limited run for stints of varying lengths are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford, Hank Azaria, Jimmy Fallon, Aidy Bryant, and Nick Kroll.

Trying to pay as close attention as I could muster for All In: Comedy About Love by Simon Rich as its four-member cast jollied along (more of those hearties later), I started thinking about the differences between the adjectives “humorous,” “amusing,” and “funny.” I was also thinking about the beloved noun “comedy.” I contend that though the words may be considered synonyms for each other, there are meaningful disparities. But first you need to know that All In: Comedy About Love by Simon Rich is exactly that, no more, no less. Purveyor Rich deals in the comic and is known as a Thurber Prize-winning humorist, an accomplished Saturday Night Live writer, and a New Yorker contributor. His books, collections of humorous pieces, include Ant Farm, New Teeth, and Glory Days.

It’s anything but a stagnant affair, at least. As the stars pantoimine and read, their voices inhabit colorful characters. Some beats may land as treacly, but the stories contain plenty of zippy lines and outlandish, cartoon-inspired shenanigans. A short story that grabs hearty laughs is one where a talent agent (Kind) persuades the Grim Reaper (Armisen) to try acting. Projected images illustrated by Emily Flake add additional humorous imagination to the show.

But there’s a gap between being game and being entertaining — especially at inflated Broadway prices. Director Alex Timbers tries to amp up the production with cartoon projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) and occasional smoke and lighting effects (by Jake DeGroot) but there’s an underlying laziness to the staging that makes the show feel slight even before you note the 85-minute running time.