.
700 Sundays
by Billy Crystal
Directed by Des McAnuff
M&I Bank
Broadway in Arizona/ASU's
Gammage Auditorium, Tempe
(480) 784-4444
January
16th - 26th, 2007
$39.00
- $150.00
(Discount
Tickets Available at 
)
Internationally beloved comedian Billy Crystal has been a
part of some of the most memorable films (When Harry Met Sally, City
Slickers) and television broadcasts (Soap and only one season,
but a memorable one, at Saturday Night Live). Standup is obviously
his forté, though, because he blossoms when working with a live audience.
We in the Valley of the Sun are lucky enough to enjoy a two-week stopover during
the tour of his Tony® Award-winning reminiscence/routine 700
Sundays.
You want shtick? He’ll give you shtick with as many scatological and
base bits as you can ever ask for. You want sap? How about this premise: a
stroll through Crystal’s childhood with a father who died when he was
in his mid-teens. You want a little historical context to keep things interesting?
There’s the fact that his family created the great jazz label Commodore
Records out of their teensy record shop across from the Chrysler Building.
Namedropping? Oy, he’s got namedropping. Here are a few names he bandies
about: Bessie Smith; Louis Armstrong; Kareem Abdul-Jabar; Sammy Davis, Jr.;
and the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks. Crystal’s ruminations go on for three
hours, but while it may drag at times (depending on your tastes), as the clock
slides toward 10:30 p.m., a time when most ASU Gammage audiences
would be dozing, he manages to bring nearly the entire audience to tears and
then gales of laughter with his personal revelations and the payoffs to his
many planted zingers.
Crystal’s engaging persona and his affable ways allow audience members
to feel as though this monologue, replete with home movies and slides projected
into the windows of a full-scale re-creation of his childhood home, is offered
to each of them individually. The first act, where he lays out the history of
his Dixieland jazz-supporting family, is interesting to those who may not know
how influential his parentage was in the jazz world. Still, he mixes the profane
with the profound and his humor is as off-color as an act straight from the Borscht
Belt days. The second act is more about him and his own history, and it becomes
a little more familiar as a stand up routine. However, as each seed he has planted
blooms into a giant guffaw, he also draws us into his tragedies, so that each
time he pulls the rug from under us as the fates had done to him, we can’t
help but become a bit misty. This worthwhile evening is proof that comedy is
tragedy with a deceptively happier ending.
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