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Joan Rivers rides her theatrical comedy vehicle |
Comic Joan puts a brave face on for the stage
JOAN RIVERS - A WORK IN PROGRESS BY A LIFE IN PROGRESS
SOME things I knew about Joan Rivers before Tuesday night: She is a stand-up comic, she is roughly the same age as currency, and she contains more plastic than the Indian Ocean.
Beyond a few vague details of her life gleaned from a half-watched interview with Jonathan Ross, that was it.
What I didn’t know was that she is a gay icon, less outrageous than my mum reckons, and a very funny, very charming lady.
A Work in Progess by a Life in Progress is essentially the Joan Rivers comedy routine thinly disguised as a play, and tells the story of her career from the early appearances on the The Ed Sullivan Show, her acrimonious split with Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show, the suicide of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and her latter-day reinvention as the queen of the Oscars red carpet (where she was the first to ask the immortal question, “Who are you wearing?”).
Why Rivers didn’t just dump the idea of writing a play and take a one-woman ‘Audience With’ show on tour escapes me.
The premise of the play is clever – the scene is the 90-minute dressing room preparation (or reconstruction) of Rivers for her date with the stars on the red carpet – but the juvenile gags and clunky writing that cue up her monologue anecdotes only get in the way of the real show, which is Rivers herself.
She is a tremendous entertainer with a vicious tongue and gift for the one-line put-down that sets her apart from modern stand-ups.
But when she’s forced to follow a rubbish script in a play that limps through its ill-conceived stages she flounders, and some of her glamour and mystique is lost as she struggles to crowbar the next segment into the dead air the play’s parish hall panto writing creates.
The play itself was awful, but the show as a whole is thoroughly enjoyable because a Rivers runs through it.
I may have been the only straight man in the audience, a large part of the Hollywood bitchiness was lost on me and the borderline racism that the Russian make-up artist was subjected to irritated me throughout.
But as the set split in two for the closing scene to reveal a red carpet, with Rivers resplendent and silhouetted against it, there was only one word to describe this miracle of resilience and modern surgical
methods, and it was a word that was on the lips of all the queen’s
subjects as they left the theatre: Fabulous!
Until September 18 and December 2-January 29
CNJ Booking Line
0870 040 0070
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