For those who aren't dedicated fans of the format, one-person shows can sometimes be a drag. It's a lot to ask of theatergoers to sit through an hour and a half of a single person onstage; a good one-person show needs the perfect combination of stage dressing, script and movement, as well as an actor who can grab and hold the audience's attention.
Buyer and Cellar, now being staged at St. Pete's freeFall Theatre, isn't quite perfect, but it is hilarious, captivating and puts enough of the ingredients in that magic recipe together to produce a great show.
Alex More is a down-and-out actor in Los Angeles, trying to make his way doing the sorts of gigs we all hear about — a Disney character, daytime retail sales — when he hears from his boyfriend about a very strange job working for an eccentric celebrity at their compound in Malibu. Alex is desperate for work, and finds himself the sole employee of a loving replica of an upscale shopping center recreated in the basement of legendary diva and gay icon Barbra Streisand.
(The basement mall is a real thing, BTW, though the play's story is most certainly not.)
More's unlikely and often absurd interactions with Babs, and the increasing friction it causes in his romantic relationship, make up the majority of Buyer and Cellar's action. As the two grow closer, More finds himself torn between his idol worship and the questions plaguing him about what he means to Streisand — is he a friend? A confidante? Just another one of the possessions that fill her house and life? These questions form the heart of a play that, without it, might come off as so much comedic gossip.
Chris Crawford goes all out as More, playing the character with an enthusiasm that might verge on camp or gay cliche, but works extremely well for the role and serves to keep the audience's attention. During the performance this viewer attended, he occasionally lost the voice/accent of one of the other characters he "plays" in recounting conversations — his boyfriend Barry, Streisand's personal assistant, Streisand herself — when switching between personas, but this is a very minor quibble; he's not actually "being" the characters, really, and it's the content of the back-and-forth that's really the point.
Crawford is wonderful, and so is the ingenious set design by Tom Hansen, but the real star here is Jonathan Tolins' rapid-fire script. It's overflowing with clever asides and offhand jokes — about being gay, about being an actor, about being Barbra Streisand, about L.A. culture, about Jewish culture; to be distracted by a noise in the audience or a vibrating phone in one's pocket is to miss something funny. There is some filler here, and if Buyer and Cellar has one flaw, it's that it falls into the one-person show trap of sometimes seeming a bit overlong. These moments are rare, however, thanks to both Tolins' astounding knack for writing stuff that sounds great when spoken and Crawford's performance and timing. And the fact that the show is actually about something more than being clever — it's pretty freaking clever, but its message of self-discovery and self-worth is very real and very poignant — makes it well worth the evening invested.
This article appears in May 23-30, 2019.