John Mulaney and Simon Rich Talk the Makings of Broadway’s All In: Comedy About Love

An arr-snarling, scurvy-having, treasure-hungry pirate gets derailed when he and his colleague, Rotten Pete, adopt a young stowaway who believes in recycling. A hard-of-hearing genie grants a bartender a…12-inch pianist. A hard-boiled gumshoe, enlisted to solve a mystery, turns out to be a toddler. His client is Baby Zoe, who lives in the “white bassinet down the hall” and is still grasping the concept of object permanence. Her origins? Unknown. “Some said she came from the hospital. But there was also a rumor she’d once lived inside of Mummy’s tummy. It didn’t add up. Still, a job was a job.”

These are the set-ups for just a few of the sketches that comprise All In: Comedy About Love, which will open its 10-week limited engagement at the Hudson Theatre on December 22. The 90-minute show features vignettes adapted from the extensive oeuvre of The New Yorker writer and Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich, performed by a star-studded, rotating group of comedy legends. John Mulaney, Fred Armisen, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Richard Kind make up the inaugural cast; coming in later on are the likes of Jimmy Fallon, Aidy Bryant, Nick Kroll, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Rich and Mulaney first met at S.N.L. in 2008, but Mulaney already knew Rich by reputation. He had been so tickled by Rich’s 2007 humor collection Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations that he gifted it to his mother for Christmas. “I didn’t normally get her things like that, but she loved it,” Mulaney tells Vogue during a video call with Rich earlier this week. “She spit out what she was drinking, laughing at the first story.”

Rich had seen Mulaney’s S.N.L. audition, and “like everybody who watches John’s stand-up, [was] really blown away.” When Mulaney first arrived at 30 Rock, Rich made a beeline to his office. “Within a few minutes literally of shaking hands, we were writing our first piece together.”

Today, they still collaborate whenever Mulaney is at 8H. “It honestly feels exactly the same as it did when we were in our early 20s,” says Rich. “I think we’ve become maybe nominally more self-aware.”

“A little bit,” Mulaney adds.

Alex Timbers, who directed Mulaney and Nick Kroll on Broadway in Oh, Hello, first approached Rich with the idea of adapting his prose for the stage in February 2024; Mulaney came onboard shortly thereafter. They then held a series of readings and workshops—some over four hours long—to suss out which of Rich’s pieces would play best for a live audience.

The resulting show has a late-night storytime vibe: A quartet of cast members sit facing the audience in comfortable-looking armchairs, water vessels by their sides, each reading their parts from an oversized book. (The backdrop, by scenic designer David Korins, recalls an eccentric study—all sparkling chandeliers, towering bookcases crammed with hardcovers, and abstract art.) The actors are joined onstage by indie band the Bengsons, who cleanse the palate between sketches with love songs written by the Magnetic Fields. A smoke machine, lighting, and projected illustrations by The New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake also interject moments of visual magic.

Wit, whimsy, and heart cohere the separate episodes—as do their absurd premises, which Rich is known for. In the ultimate and perhaps most touching scene, “History Report,” a girl living in 2074 speaks from her home on New Earth, where humans were forced to flee after our generation failed to do anything about the climate crisis. She is interviewing her great-grandfather, a former writer named Simon Rich, whose work has been lost but who once wrote a “weird show about love that was part of Broadway’s final theater season.” The narrator relays how Rich met her great-grandmother in college (“a place people used to go to after high school to learn how to drink alcohol”) and divulges that their ensuing marriage nearly ended in the 2050s, when they both had affairs with sex robots with spinning, glow-up genitals. (The robots were so enticing that the UN was forced to ban them so citizens would once again leave their homes and society could continue.)

“I am excited to be working on a show comprised of love stories as opposed to, for example, a super fucked-up, dark drama right now,” Rich says.

When asked if this show is proof that our cultural idea of what constitutes a love story has changed over time, Mulaney jumps in: “I think of these actually as commitment stories…There's moments of meet-cutes and first loves, but there’s also just the everydayness of what it’s like to share life with someone.” (Both men are married: Mulaney to actor Olivia Munn, Rich to fellow writer Kathleen Hale.)

“We hit upon the madness of courtship early on in the show,” says Rich. “But then it quickly turns into my more recent stories, which are much more about long-term commitment and the challenges and joys that come with pursuing actual scary, adult love.”

While All In’s themes lean mature, Mulaney notes that he has spotted a few children in the audience each night—and they appear to be laughing at the right moments. In fact, he has been surprised by how many people of different ilks seem to be enjoying the show. “Some hardened people I know were quite moved by it,” Mulaney says. “Some really cynical, weird libertarian people.”