Review: Crystal’s ‘Sundays’ Hilarious
NEW YORK (AP) – “My first hero.” That’s what Billy Crystal calls his father, Jack, during “700 Sundays,” the comedian’s fond journey back to his boyhood that opened Sunday at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre.
And the show can probably remain there for as long as Crystal is willing to tell his frankly sentimental, yet very funny tale. The man may be talking about his own family, but Crystal’s story is a universal one ó of growing up, coming to terms with his parents (not to mention a carload of crazy relatives) and making his way in the world.
Crystal, an elfin man with an endless supply of energy, is a savvy storyteller. With the help of director Des McAnuff, he has put together an affecting memoir that is surprisingly theatrical, considering the comedian is the only performer on stage.
The man certainly has had a varied and successful showbiz career ó from “Soap” to “Saturday Night Live,” movies such as “Analyze This” and, of course, gigs as host of the Academy Awards.
But what he talks about here is more personal, so it’s fitting that designer David F. Weiner’s setting is the facade of the family home, a modest brick house in suburban Long Island. The time is post-World War II when Ed Sullivan was on television, automobiles sported big fins and Mickey Mantle was the star of the New York Yankees.
Crystal is the youngest son of Jack and Helen Crystal. Dad was a jazz musician and concert promoter who also ran the Commodore Music Shop, a legendary jazz record store in New York. Mom was a housewife. And there was a parade of colorful grandparents, uncles and aunts, “the Jewish Kennedys,” according to Crystal, who would “sell you the shirt off their backs.”
The performer, dressed in a casually expensive burgundy sweater and dark slacks, prowls the stage as he lovingly tells their stories. What emerges are vivid portraits of people and a time. He talks of his Uncle Milt, who founded Commodore Records and who, among other things, recorded Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” when other record labels turned down the song about the lynching of a black man.
There are pictures, too, of those jazz and Dixieland musicians, garrulous, genial men who called the perpetually eager and always smiling Crystal “Face.” He remembers going to the movies with Holiday and watching “Shane,” which astonished him because it featured a little boy in a major role ó child actor Brandon de Wilde.
There’s Aunt Sheila and the story of her lesbian daughter’s wedding in San Francisco as well as his family’s encounter with a local Mafia kingpin who accidentally wrecks the family’s new Plymouth, among others.
Home movies and old black-and-white photographs complement Crystal’s monologue, and they show a peppy little boy, mugging for the camera and frantically tap-dancing, or adults doing the goofy things that always occur when the filming of home movies begins.
Yet the heart of Crystal’s evening is Jack Crystal, a man who died too young (he had a heart attack in a bowling alley at the age of 54). His death jolts his 15-year-old son into a new appreciation of what the man accomplished and what his mother, Helen, then did to keep the family together.
The show’s title, “700 Sundays,” comes from a calculation by Crystal that father and son spent that many Sundays together before Jack Crystal died. Sunday was the one day of the week the two had to enjoy each other’s company since Jack Crystal always held two or three jobs. Too short a time, of course, but they were enough to produce an affecting, hilarious evening of theater.
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