Old hats do hilarious new tricks at ACT
If I had to name the most entertaining stage show I’ve seen in the past 20 years, two nominees would surely be Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Fool Moon the first time I saw it at A.C.T. and Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Fool Moon the second time I saw it at A.C.T. Now there’s a new nominee: Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Old Hats at (guess where) A.C.T., right now
The show left me helpless with laughter.
Irwin and Shiner are brilliant clowns. Irwin is the better known to Bay Area audiences, since he spent five years with pals Geoff Hoyle and Larry Pisoni in the Pickle Family Circus troupe in the 1970s before going on to make movies, do TV and win a couple of Tonys, one for going head to head with Kathleen Turner in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. As for Shiner, after sharpening his skills in Europe with the likes of the German and Swiss National Circuses, he showed up for American audiences in Cirque du Soleil’s Nouvell Experience. He’s also starred on Broadway (Suessical the Musical) and guested on TV (The Bill Cosby Show).
Together Bill Irwin and David Shiner are (cliché-alert) a match made in heaven. Comedy heaven, that is. Both of them can do the trapped-mime bit to perfection (in Old Hats they do it as irony), but they go way beyond the well-worn tropes of silent comedy. Still, silent they are. Except for one song-and-dance sequence, Old Hats is wordless. It’s not soundless, however, because brash, apple-cheeked singer/pianist Shaina Taub and her band–Jacob Colin Cohen and Mike Dobson (percussion) Mike Brun (bass) and Justin J. Smith (trumpet)–are on hand. The peppy quintet punctuates the evening with Taub’s offbeat songs as well as with dozens of ricochetting sound effects.
Those sound effects accompany the show’s first startling moment: the comedy duo scampering frantically to escape a giant Indiana Jones-like boulder, a visual effect that’s just one of Wendell K. Harrington and Erik Pearson’s ingenious projections. Ten “numbers” follow, in the first of which Irwin and Shiner attempt to outdo one another in the hat-trick department, from which the only conclusion must be that they may be “old hat” (they’re both sixty something) but that their talents are as new-minted as dew, They sparkle.
Of the rest of their amusingly varied collection of bits, a highlight is Irwin’s astonishing encounter, as “Mr. Business,” with an iPad selfie which proceeds to mock him, stalk him, attack him, bore into his brain, and at one point suck him into the iPad. Another is Shiner’s “Cowboy Cinema,” a reprise from Fool Moon, that casts him as a frustrated cameraman who hauls a hapless quartet of patrons onstage as victims in one of the funniest audience-participation encounters I’ve seen.
Irwin and Shiner are a marriage made in heaven, but aside from a shared talent, it’s a marriage of unlikes. Irwin is the sweeter of the two. He can project a daffy, boyish blitheness. Shiner has an edge. He snarls, he rolls his eyes, he even rages. In other words they complement one another, and when Shaina Taub joins them for a cheery vaudeville song and dance, they’re a smashing trio.
Smartly directed by Tina Laudau, with sets and costumes by G.W. Mercier, lighting by Scott Zeilinski and sound by John Gromada, Old Hats plays on Geary Street until October 12th, followed by Colm Toibin’s Testament. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information inaugurates A.C.T.’s new Strand Theater in the spring. For tickets/information call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org
.–ROBERT HALL