Modern Family's Jess Tyler Ferguson returns to Broadway in the role of a lifetime!
Starring five-time Emmy Award nominee Jesse Tyler Ferguson and directed by Tony nominee Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect, Avenue Q), FULLY COMMITTED is the "hilarious and touching" (Time Out New York) comedy that takes a sharp skewer to the backside of the restaurant biz.
You think you're having a bad day at work? Meet Sam. He covers the red-hot reservation line at one of New York's most exclusive restaurants, juggling desperate diners, scheming socialites, name-dropping wannabes, celebrity divas, panicked waiters and a fame-hungry chef. And in this side-splitting tour-de-force, Ferguson plays all 40 characters!
I don't know if it qualifies as part of Broadway's ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays, by my count, an astonishing 34 roles, together constituting a rainbow of assholes. Initially he's just Sam Callahan, a struggling actor sullenly working a pre-Christmas shift taking reservations at a superhot Manhattan restaurant. But as the outside lines, the in-house intercoms, and his own cellphone start ringing, Ferguson takes on the vocal and gestural lives of all the callers: would-be guests, terrified assistants; his agent, friends, frenemies, and family; the arrogant chef, the tantrum-y maître d', and various others, all exploding with ASAP demands. Needless to say, this being a restaurant, none of the demands is a true emergency, no matter how much the callers bully and scream - unless accommodating Gwyneth Paltrow with an all-vegan tasting menu for 15, with flattering light bulbs and no women servers, counts as an emergency.
'Fully Committed' has essentially a one-joke premise, which becomes apparent after about 20 minutes of ringing phones; a slender subplot revolving around Sam's recently widowed dad in the Midwest, whose fondest hope is that Sam won't have to work on Christmas, does add a soupçon of genuine warmth. The sustained enjoyment comes from the impressively controlled mayhem activated by Ferguson, under Jason Moore's savvy direction. The actor not only manages to soothe Sam's savage callers, but also the most judgmental of the evening's ticketholders.
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