Review: BUYER & CELLAR at Penguin Repertory Theatre

After reading in Barbra Streisand's 2010 book "My Passion for Design" that the basement of her Malibu mansion is actually a mini-mall in the form of a street, lined with shops containing her myriad possessions arranged as merchandise, playwright Jonathan Tollins had an incredibly original idea. He decided it would be fascinating to see what it would be like to be the sole employee of Streisand's private mini-mall, as a salesperson in the stores, with the superstar as its sole customer.

E Viola! "Buyer & Cellar!" The show is an extremely clever and inventive concept with sprite and clever dialogue (far too many great one-liners to mention here). The show runs for a breezy 90 minutes which flies by in the blink of an eye, due to the boatloads of charm brought to the production by its sole player, the altogether delightful, Parker Drown.

Tolins manages to touch on the populist as well as the more high-brow as he examines the campy aspects of the preposterous situation as well as the psychology of the isolated superstar reaching out for a friend in her employee. While it's hardly serious theater, it is certainly more than merely celebrity-driven kitsch. Early on in the show, Drown is a bit manic as out of work actor, Alex More, who has just been fired from his job as the mayor of Toon Town at Disneyland after losing his patience and yelling at an obnoxious child. But once he settles down into Alex's skin, Drown delivers an extraordinary performance full of humor, wit and pitch perfect comic timing. The material never ventures into the profound but it is quite touching as it probes "our" collective obsession with celebrity and the public's overwhelming desire to know every tiny tidbit about them.

Alex spends his days dusting and caring for the merchandise, cleaning the stores, and listening to the "whurrr" of the popcorn maker and the frozen yogurt machine, waiting for La Streisand to visit. When it happens, she calls herself Sadie. Before long, they move on to a first-name basis, and the superstar begins to confide in Alex - almost to the point of befriending him. The concept of the mega-star who sits alone, friendless in the big mansion is a bit of a cliché, but the playwright brings a delightful twist to it. No spoilers here!

The playwright tosses in quite a few seemingly anachronistic references to 60s and 70s culture (e.g. Mister Whipple, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis, Mrs. Beasley from A Family Affair, Shirley Booth as Hazel) which no 20-something LA actor in 2010 would reasonably be expected to know. Ironically - when I saw this show in NYC three years ago, very few in the audience even reacted to the references, yet at Penguin, the audience howled! Go figure! Director Stephen Nachamie, Scenic Designer Patrick Rizzotti, and Projection Designer Brian Prather, closely follow the off Broadway production's concept, but succeed in creating and drawing the audience into Streisand's subterranean "utopia".

All in all, "Buyer & Cellar" is a hit, a laugh-out-loud delight, replete with a brilliantly comic performance of herculean proportion from Mr. Drown. "Buyer & Cellar" is a thoroughly enjoyable and immensely entertaining production and Penguin clearly has another hit on its hands.

Buyer & Cellar continues at Penguin Repertory Theatre through July 24th.

Tickets available at: www.penguinrep.org

Penguin Rep Theatre

7 Crickettown Road

P.O. Box 91

Stony Point, NY

-Peter Danish