COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD (ABRIDGED) REVIEWED
COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD (ABRIDGED)
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Reduced Shakespeare Company (a.k.a. R.S.C. but definitely NOT to be confused with the Royal Shakespeare Company—although they would like be) is currently performing two alternating comedies at the Marines Memorial Theatre: THE BIBLE: THE COMPLETE WORD OF GOD (ABRIDGED) and COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD (ABRIDGED).
Nightly the cast is drawn from a pool of seven, seasoned, actor-comedians: Dominic Conti, Matthew Croke, Michael Faulkner, Jerry Kernion, Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Brent Tubbs.
If you were a tourist on a $10 per day budget or if you spent most of your entertainment budget tipping the therapists over at the Green Door and you could only pay for one show, this critic would most strongly recommend paying for COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD.
But, if you miss your Greyhound back to Manteca and have to spend extra night in Union Square, this critic would urge you to sneak in, via the fire escape, a lifted man-hole-cover or the stage door, and catch THE BIBLE: it could reconnect you with your red-neck fundamentalist roots and nudge you closer to the Republican Party; but more importantly: the theater is much warmer than the outdoors and the lavatories are clean.
COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD dissects and skewers ninety-nine percent of all the Hollywood movies that you may have mistakenly admitted that you enjoyed.
When you get home from COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD you will probably want to sort through your steamer trucks of Beta-Maxes or simply demagnetize all your videotapes and Movie Sound Tracks cassettes with a hand-held cyclotron.
The action and gags are so fast that the audience is apt to wonder if the writers Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Dominic Conti spared any of the wholesome Hollywood classics.
Furthermore one might ask if these irreverent film iconoclasts ever saw a Hollywood movie that they enjoyed.
Did these cinema snobs grow up renting beach chairs to Nebbish Autures at Cannes?
Of one thing you can be sure: if Robert Redford ever sees their show, they will be persona non grata at the next Sundance Festival.
While some movies like AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIVE and SHAYNE are fair game, moreover sitting ducks for parody, one has to wonder how these satirists could unleash the gall to spoof and lampoon such sacrosanct epics as THE FLY, POSEDIAN ADVANTURE, BATTLEFIELD EARTH, WATERWORLD, THE TRIP and ROAD HOUSE.
HOLLYWOOD looks beyond the morally bankrupt glitterati, druggies, drunk drivers and 12-steppers of the toupeed film industry and focuses on the artistically bankrupt directors, producers and screenwriters that foist fetid films from afar.
In this show, all the tangled trite tripe of Hollywood is conveniently reduced down to its essence: off-the-shelf plot lines, stock characters, sniveling sentimentality, recycled cliché and obscene profits.
As the play points out: once a movie audience gets past Paramount's snow-clad Mattahorn, Warner Brothers' Roaring Lion, or Columbia's Columbia with the slinky satin blue dress and the dazzling torch, it is all downhill from there: the rest of the movie is a hybrid clone of a clone of a clone of a remake of a sequel.
We all know that it is fun to laugh at someone else's abysmal unsophisticated taste in movies: but where else are we going to get our spurious sense of chic cultural superiority?
When a rookie on your softball team claims to like STEEL MAGNOLIAS, FRIED GREEN TOMATOES and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE don't be surprised if his batting average is barely double digits.
HOLLYWOOD goes the extra quarter mile to point out that it is also fun to laugh at our own abysmal taste in movies.
After seeing HOLLYWOOD, you will not be ashamed to tell people that you have a boxed DVD set of Pee-Wee Herman's Greatest Hits and have seen every movie that Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon ever made.
For a great evening of uproarious laughter get thee to COMPLETELY HOLLYWOOD. Call the Marines Memorial box office at 415-771-6900 between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.