![]() His snooty maître d’ is as persuasive as his brutish boss. Ferguson has a wonderfully pliant voice that allows him to change personas within seconds - sometimes less - as he gives us both sides of tense, terse conversations. Like the originator of the role, the terrific Mark Setlock (who helped create the characters, drawn from his own experience), Mr. (And don’t you know who I am?) Sam’s challenge today is particularly formidable because he’s the only reservation taker who managed to show up for his shift. And a rejected caller sweetly threatens him: “Ever heard of a little thing called Yelp?”īut mostly, the laughs derive from the original source: the frenzied circus that Sam must oversee as he jumps from phone line to phone line, trying to placate callers who really must must must have a table tonight, preferably any time between 7:30 and 8. ![]() He fields family calls on a cellphone - it looks as if he will be forced to work over Christmas - which he must place atop a pipe in the cramped basement where he works in order to get any reception. Sam now works in a shrine to molecular gastronomy - an exotic, if not unknown, term in 1999 - for a chef who makes appearances on the “Today” show. Mode has updated the play to reflect changes in the restaurant world. Now that you could probably do so at a few restaurants here - and elsewhere - the harassed and humiliated Sam has a nimbus of pathos around him that lets a little helium out of the humor balloon. On the sixth day of every month, the third month out opens up for reservations.” Gotcha.īut in the latter days of the last century, you’d have been hard pressed to spend almost $3,000 for dinner for four, even at one of the city’s most expensive restaurants (assuming that you were not a banker who took pride in ordering the most expensive magnum of red). Explaining to an out-of-towner the restaurant’s elaborate timing for opening up reservations, Sam patiently says: “We work about three months in advance. Mode was wittily skewering have only increased over the years. It remains that, of course, and the trends Ms. Mode’s dizzy riff on the absurdities of scoring a table at a fashionable restaurant could be enjoyed for what it was: a biting (sorry) comedy about the loopiness of the flowering foodie culture. Ferguson, who began his career in the theater but sources his Broadway-headliner status from his role on ABC’s “Modern Family,” brings such warmth and variety to his performance that you may not notice that in the more than 15 years since the play opened Off Broadway, it has acquired a slightly sour aftertaste.īack in 1999, the words “income inequality” were not on the lips of every economist, pundit and politician, and Ms. ![]() Bounding around the stage of the Lyceum Theater, where the play opened on Monday, he jousts with not one or two but three different phones, nearly sweating through his gingham shirt as he gives voice to more than 40 characters, among them the harried but even-tempered central character, Sam an imperious French maître d’ a patronizing bully of a chef a chipper assistant to Gwyneth Paltrow a socialite with a manner even more imposing than her name and a lively menagerie of other New York types. As a struggling actor who earns a living taking reservations for one of Manhattan’s high-end food temples - once known as restaurants - Jesse Tyler Ferguson, the sole performer in Becky Mode’s “Fully Committed,” is a comic dynamo with seemingly endless energy.
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