 |
| Family
matters: Side Man plays for the laughs. |
Playing
for Laughs
By
James Yeara
Side
Man
By
Warren Leight, directed by Steve Coat
Home
Made Theater, Spa Little Theater, through Oct. 28
Scenic
designer Mary Fran Hughes’ set stretches across the stage
in director Steve Coats’ production of Side Man at
Spa Little Theater. A bar with several LPs on the wall is
tucked into the far-stage-right corner; upstage, huge painted
flats in bright colors rise three stories tall, black music
notes placed amid the yellows and reds; a restaurant booth
with black-and-white photos of jazz musicians on the wall
is tucked into the stage left corner. That’s a lot of empty
space to fill between the tucked eateries and in front of
the black notes surrounded by colors.
Side
Man, winner of the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play, tells
the story of Clifford Glimmer (Peter Burleigh), son of trumpet
player Gene Glimmer (Ron DeLucia) and his fiery wife Terry
Glimmer (Winnie Bowen). The narrative leaps back and forth
from Clifford’s present, 1985, and Gene’s prime, 1953, with
stops in the ever downward in-between years. The play unfolds
through Clifford’s direct address to the audience, seemingly
seeking to enact the truth of the William Wordsworth verse:
“The child is the father of the man.” It’s not a poem the
Glimmers would know, even though their lives reflect the truth
of it. Clifford tells the stories that have been told to him,
stories that revolve around his father’s career as a “sideman,”
a musician hired to play with the headliner, and the toll
he, his fellow sidemen, his wife, and his son paid. “The rocksh
in her head match the wholesh in hish,” as speech-impaired
sideman Ziggy (John Schmiederer) says.
The picaresque stories are plumbed for their laughs, and the
audience reacts as if this were a Neil Simon play. The performances
are broadly comic, and nary a moment is lost in the pursuit
of the laughs. Gene’s fellow sidemen—macho yet sensitive Al
(Armando Morales), the lishping Ziggy, and addict trombone
player Jonesy (Stephen Henel)—hang out at “Melody Lounge”
down left, flirt with the leggy blond waitress Patsy (a willowy
Audrey Looye), who turns out through the spiral of the years
to be a serial marrier/divorcee, tell stories, and listen
to jazz. Clifford is like Eugene Morris Jerome, the protagonist
of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi
Blues, and Burleigh captures all the wane comedy in his
father’s desultory life. The cast is up to the task of evoking
laughter; even the scenes when Terry begins her slide into
the life of the sideman’s wife, naively smoking a joint, taking
the first of what becomes a river of drinks, casually salting
her dialogue with “You guys are fucking weird,” “Is ‘motherfucker’
bad or good?” or “Enjoy your macaroni and cheese, motherfuckers,”
elicit laughs. Shooting heroin into eyeballs, suicide attempts,
brawls, and mental illness seem as funny as everything else,
or like mere filler notes on the way to rimshots.
In this respect, the set seems to be symbolic of the performances:
Everything is stretched thin. There’s funny, but Side Man
has more to offer than jazzy Neil Simon.
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