I don’t know whether Picasso and Dali ever shared a canvas, or if you could mash up Beethoven and Mozart into a decent concerto, but audiences at off-Broadway’s splendiferously reconstituted Pershing Square Signature Center can at least watch two grandmasters of silent physical comedy, Bill Irwin and David Shiner, plying their trade on a single stage. Of course, those of us with long memories will recall with delirious fondness Fool Moon,Shiner and Irwin’s great pairing that ran off-Broadway in 1993 and returned to enrapture theatergoers two more times. Backed by the countrified Red Clay Ramblers band, the two offered individual routines as well as tandem comedy bits, with Irwin able to display his amiable charm and nearly boneless movements (e.g., walking “downstairs” in to a box), and the more mischievous Shiner goading the audience and bringing down the house with his Cirque du Soleil-honed movie-director sketch.
Fool Moon remains one of the most cherished experiences in all my years of playgoing, so forgive me if I can’t work up quite the same level of enthusiasm for Old Hats. If you’ve never seen Irwin and Shiner before, for heaven’s sakes stop reading and order tickets immediately. If you have, be assured that it’s more of the same, with neither performer losing an ounce of energy or grace, and much fun to be had watching the pair try to one-up each other in juggling hats and dishes or currying the audience’s favor.
Irwin has an absolutely brilliant bit that plays with the moving images of himself on an iPad – a reimagining of his TV routine years ago in Largely New York, though back then, he had to make do with an old-fashioned, mounted television monitor. Captivating as the new bit is, it’s not ideally suited for the 294-seat Diamond Theater at the Pershing. Comfy and attractive as the theater is, it feels a tad cold and distant for the chummy antics occurring onstage.
Welcome, though, is a sketch that has Irwin and Shiner playing warring politicians. The gags fly so quickly, blink and you miss why one speechmaker’s popularity has suddenly upticked while the other must find an increasingly outrageous method to win back the public. It is great fun to see these clowns working in an “old-hat” tradition yet also employing cell phones, remote controls, day-of-the-week pill cases and other modernities in their shtick.
Later in the show, Shiner offers a “sad clown” routine that begins hilariously with him picking item after item out of a garbage can, with each find proving a bigger disappointment. However, the move towards pathos at the end doesn’t work as well. Irwin returns in act two to a Fool Moon sequence of a man trying to cook mop-like spaghetti (though the subsequent “dueling waiters” skit is not reprised here), while Shiner brings back his ever-reliable, and still great, movie routine. (Though, for some reason, he’s had to revise the bit’s most uproarious sight gag, which formerly relied on an understandable mistake by the audience volunteer and now simply uses a rigged prop.)
Backing all the proceedings is a large and overly loud band, with the adorable Nellie McKay leading at the piano and offering between-bit songs in her captivating husky voice and clipped-consonants delivery. Perhaps moving the band to a pit area, rather than having them off to the side, would have made the drumbeat punctuations of gags less intrusive and annoying. How odd to be flinching rather than giggling at jokes that are, in themselves, noiseless!
Still, all these caveats cannot bedim the fact that two legends are doing their thing, and, at least in the first act, adding new wrinkles and entirely new concepts. It’s hard to imagine these mad hatters ever going out of style.
