The Sit-Down Comedy of All In

Photo: Emilio Madrid

I hate to be a Grinch at Christmas, but it’s not a good sign when your Broadway show has more than one Reddit thread asking if it’s a scam. So things currently stand for Simon Rich’s All In: Comedy About Love. Bothered by the lack of indefinite article there? I hear you, but alas, for All In to qualify as a comedy about love, it would actually have to be a play. Instead, it’s an expensive staged reading with a rotating cast of celebrities.

Admittedly, the show’s marketing team has been careful about their wording: All In, says its website, is “a series of hilarious short stories … read by some of the funniest people on the planet.” That, adjectives aside, is accurate. Rich and John Mulaney are both former Saturday Night Live writers, and Mulaney seems to be doing his friend a solid—while continuing his awkward post-divorce-and-rehab tour—by anchoring All In. He starts the show off with some stand-up, written by Rich (a hoary bit where the actual joke, Mulaney-style, is that it all continues long past the punchline, eventually shoehorning itself into the show’s “love” theme), and if you enjoy seeing humans at their full height, you’d better lean in now, because it’s the only standing anyone will do for the next 90 minutes. To call the show “directed” by Alex Timbers feels generous. Timbers, a regular Mulaney collaborator, assembles what feels like a jazzed-up New Yorker Festival panel with an intensely elder-millennial-baiting edge. David Korins’s set decoration says “cool Upper West Side professor,” Jake DeGroot’s lights go heavy on the pink, and Lucy Mackinnon’s projections incorporate cute black-and-white cartoons that complete the sensation that we’re here for a Shouts & Murmurs read-aloud. Most shameless of all—yes, I did feel targeted, and yes, I did resent it—the show is scored with live renditions of songs from the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 opus 69 Love Songs, played by an onstage band with the music-theater couple the Bengsons at the forefront.

With all the Stephen Merritt coming at us, along with an extended bit about Arrested Development that occurs in the last of the evening’s stories, All In is placing quite a bet on the nostalgia of aging hipsters. It’s also set to feature plenty of that (my) generation’s SNL and Broadway favorites in its rotating cast: Mulaney will stick it out for half the show’s ten-week run, then switch out with Lin-Manuel Miranda, with different trios of well-known funny folks alongside them. I saw Richard Kind, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Fred Armisen, but you might see, among others, Hank Azaria, Jimmy Fallon, Chloe Fineman, or—he couldn’t not—Nick Kroll somewhere down the line. And if paying $149 or more to see any of these folks sit in armchairs and read from binders is enough for you, go forth and god bless.

Despite the sus vibes, the production isn’t without charm. All four performers in my version of All In, especially Kind and Goldsberry, squeezed as much character out of the thin material as possible, and though Rich’s writing hits some clunky lows (missed-connections classifieds from the POV of dogs? Not a banger), he also lands on several genuinely funny conceits. (Or rather landed — the stories aren’t new; they all come from his published collections.) The SNL influence is palpable: Rich is a writer in search of a sketch concept — usually a heightened genre that he can stuff with mundane, “oh, isn’t that relatable” scenarios and casually contemporary vocabulary in order to play off the disparity between form and content. We get a tale of life-partner pirates (Mulaney and Armisen) who start every sentence with “Arr” and wind up adopting a sweet little stowaway (Goldsberry). There’s a prim Victorian case study, narrated with gusto by Kind as a respectable medical man who’s afraid that his wife (Goldsberry) is falling for the Elephant Man (Armisen, playing Joseph Merrick as a Portlandia douchebag). There’s also the story of a third-rate talent agent (Kind) who manages to sign Death (Armisen) as a client — and maybe it was just me, but I couldn’t stop giggling at how the mic filter meant to turn Armisen into the Grim Reaper essentially just made him sound like regular everyday Adam Driver.

By far the strongest piece in the bunch, though, is “The Big Nap.” It’s a hardboiled noir told by a world-weary detective who also happens to be a 2-year-old trying to crack the case of Moomoo, his baby sister’s missing stuffed unicorn. Rich’s preferred device is at its funniest here, with Mulaney in high Philip Marlowe mode, throwing out sinister speculations about the depths of this heinous crime (“Mama’s the big boss around here. She pulls all the strings … Dada’s just a bag man”) and Goldsberry vamping amusingly as a femme fatale who has yet to develop object permanence. “I’m completely lost. I don’t know where I am, and I forgot what’s happening … I also don’t understand mirrors,” she says, half flailing and half channeling Bette Davis. Or, when Mulaney’s private eye demands to know where she got the Batman stickers she’s offered him as pay (“How do I know these aren’t hot?”), her eyes flutter vaguely as she purrs: “I don’t remember. Sometimes things are just in my hand.”

Concluding with a “history report” read by Goldsberry as Rich’s own imagined great-granddaughter—writing about the mysterious customs of her great-grandparents back when human beings still lived on Earth—All In neither ends nor begins with its best material. When faced with the climate apocalypse, Rich veers cliché and sentimental. Better to stick with the Bogie and Bacall babies and the Park Slope pirates. In those worlds, the show’s low-stakes humor blends most successfully with its aspiration to tell some small but not trivial truths around things like being a parent, being a sibling, and growing up. If this final Broadway show of 2024 is  the year’s dessert, All In feels like a strange culinary hybrid: Breyers vanilla served with gold leaf and just enough Dubai chocolate to try and get it trending on TikTok. It’s got a simple center, with some fun and some heart to it, but the commercial stunt of the whole endeavor is pointed and unavoidable. Maybe that’s not an inappropriate metaphor for Christmas, or for Broadway, but it can leave you feeling a bit like Goldsberry’s baby dame: not quite sure what exactly we’re all doing here.

All In is at the Hudson Theatre through February 16.