Big Bang' to start off Orlando Shakes season with, well, a bang

Big Bang' to start off Orlando Shakes season with, well, a bang



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PX00191_9[1] By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic

For a long time, Philip Nolen and Robby Pigott have wanted to do a play together.

Something deep. Something meaningful. Something as far as possible from the “life-affirming, happy, corporate stuff,” as Nolen puts it, that, as contract actors for Disney World, each of them performs every day.

They thought about K2, the dark drama about two doomed climbers trapped on a ledge of the world’s second tallest mountain. But what they came up with was The Big Bang, a musical comedy in which two guys re-enact the history of the world from the beginning — the big bang — until now.

Meaningful? Deep? Well, Nolen says so.

“The laughs will be deep,” he insists. “They’ll be belly laughs.”

In The Big Bang, members of the audience stand in for rich New Yorkers who have been invited to a swanky Upper East Side apartment for a backers’ audition of the biggest, most expensive musical ever produced. The two men who wrote it — director Jim Helsinger calls them “innocent wannabes” — are trying to raise $83.5 million to do the show. They can’t perform all 12 hours of it. So the two of them do excerpts, playing all the characters and tearing apart the apartment’s furnishings to make all the costumes and props.

Think of it as The Producers crossed with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), all performed by two guys in lampshades and drapes.

Written by Boyd Graham and Jed Feuer (son of longtime Broadway producer Cy Feuer, who produced the original Guys and Dolls and many other hits), The Big Bang got its start in 2000, when Graham and Feuer themselves performed it for about six weeks off-Broadway. The New York Times gave it a less-than-favorable review. But theaters around the country have been quick to pick up on a show that’s inexpensive to produce and pulls audiences in in droves. In Florida, the little show has turned up at theaters in Fort Myers, Coral Gables, Jupiter, Sarasota and St. Petersburg — and in some of those theaters twice.

At Orlando Shakespeare Theater, the musical comedy starts off a season that, as Helsinger explains, will have plenty of meat later on. Helsinger, the theater’s artistic director, originally wanted to open the season with a stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. But in rough economic times, the money wasn’t there.

He compares the cost of doing a two-man musical to that of producing last year’s season opener, Kiss Me, Kate, which had 20 actors and an orchestra.

“This show, which I think will kick the season off with just as much fun, you’re paying 26 fewer people,” Helsinger says. “If I have 20 actors in a musical, each one has three to five costumes. Instead of 60-70 costumes, here I’m building two.”

Rough times, he says, also make audiences seek out lighter fare

“When times get fiscally tough, you can see theaters reach for what’s really funny and has a small cast. Audiences want to be uplifted and push away their cares in the theater.”

Anyway, he says, the same season also includes Hamlet and two new plays based on contemporary cataclysms: Shotgun, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Yankee Tavern, set in New York after 9/11.

“We’ve got plenty of serious,” Helsinger says, “so let’s start it off with a fun bang.”

It’s up to Nolen and Pigott to provide that fun, with their impersonations of two fellows playing Adam and Eve, Pocahontas and Minnehaha, Columbus and Isabella, Napoleon and Josephine, the Virgin Mary and Mahatma Gandhi’s mother, Tokyo Rose and Shanghai Lil. And more.

Nolen calls the two would-be producers “more enthusiastic than talented,” and he and Pigott says they have to be careful not to lock eyes onstage because they’re likely to collapse into giggles.

“We think, ‘What are we doing?’” Nolen says. “’We are adults! I am a full-grown man!’”

Which leads us back to depth, and to Pigott, who insists they’ll find it — somewhere.

“Really, these guys are so sincere,” he says. “These guys are serious about what they’re doing — and that’s funny.”

Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.