Just like one of the narratives that played out on his hit HBO show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is having some problems on Broadway (this time, it has less to do with David Schwimmer). The New York Times recently reviewed Fish in the Dark, which David wrote and stars in, and they had less than glowing sentiments concerning the flaccidity of his work. Take it away, Broadway critic Ben Brantley:
More than a few (dozen) vintage sitcoms have used similar plots. Sometimes they were funny. But to be really funny, such stories must be more than the sum of their situations and their zingers. “Fish” gives us archetypes as old as commedia dell’arte and one-liners as old as the Catskills. But credible, breathing, present-tense characters are nowhere to be found.
Fish is about a quarreling family in the aftermath of a matriarch’s death. Brantley posits that the biggest audience reaction occurred when David injected his trademark line from Curb, “Pret-ty, pret-ty…”
“I laughed fully exactly once,” Brantley said in reference to the one joke that made him chuckle.
Despite the poor review, David has set the record for most pre-sales for a Broadway play, which means this will likely not be his only foray into writing and acting for the stage.