You know Broadway is having a comedy moment when actors in plays as diverse as “Eureka Day,” “Cult of Love” and the runaway phenomenon known as “Oh, Mary!” are routinely drowned out by the audience’s laughter.
You might assume that Simon Rich’s Broadway debut, “All In,” whose subtitle promises “Comedy About Love,” would join this honor roll. But this new production is a slight affair that’s as easy to forget as it is to watch. Theatergoers likely to get the most mileage out of the show’s 90 minutes at the Hudson Theater are those who bust a gut reading The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section — they must exist, right? — where some of this material has appeared.
Many lines do land in “All In,” which consists of short segments based on Rich’s stories. This is a not-unexpected outcome for a former “Saturday Night Live” writer whose prose has been compared to early Woody Allen, and for the ace performers delivering his words — Fred Armisen, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Kind and John Mulaney.
This was the quartet onstage at the show I attended; the cast will rotate throughout the run. Come later and you will see different performers. Chloe Fineman, for example, will step in for Goldsberry as of Dec. 30; Lin-Manuel Miranda, Andrew Rannells and Mulaney’s “Oh, Hello” partner, Nick Kroll, start on Jan. 14. Think of it as actors playing a game of rotating armchairs. Which is fitting since that is where they spend the show, reading from scripts. (Rich’s old friend and colleague Mulaney is an outlier: He delivers the first piece standing up and appears to be mostly off book.)
Reading rather than memorizing is obviously a necessity when you have famous folks with little time for rehearsal going in and out of the production at a quick clip. Besides, the device has been effective in plays like “Love Letters,” “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” and “Pre-Existing Condition” (where there actually was a conceptual principle behind the rotating actresses playing the lead character).
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