The Big Bang

Okay, so here’s the premise of this laugh-strewn play: “The Big Bang” is really about The Big Ask. The Really Big Ask.

Two consummately creative young songwriters in a New York apartment are pitching what would be the biggest budget Broadway musical to potential investors who are played by Us, the audience. It’s billed as a “backer’s audition” for what would be a four-part 12-hour history of the world with a cast of 318, with 1,400 wigs and some ungodly number of prosthetic devices (for reasons unknown) and Woodstock done up in 3D. (The sense that they’re hosting this private party is enhanced when our heroes tour between the dinner theatre tables to bus the dishes after Intermission.)

It’s a tough sell since these guys gotta make their case with a decidedly lower-budget sampler, playing all the roles with costumes and props they put together on the fly. (To simulate the actual Big Bang of creation, they pop an inflated paper bag.)

But you wanna know something? The guys playing these guys (Chris Carwithen and Gregg Land) are such brilliant and likeable performers with sturdy singing voices—and the script is so close to perfect—it’s easy to imagine investors really ponying up. (They are as good a pairing as the Cabaret’s chocolate ice cream-based Dick Hay Pie with a bottle of dark and creamy Black Butte Porter.)

Bottom line: This latest Cabaret Theatre offering is as good as it gets. I urge you to see it. In fact, I believe in it so much I’ll bet you $10,000 that you’ll agree. (Sorry, I forgot; I’m not Mitt Romney. I’m a Realtor. How about if I put up a quarter?)

The musical numbers, with able accompaniment by Erik Daniells on the piano, may not be ones you’ll go home humming, but they serve the shtick well, and Carwithen and Land’s two-part harmonies and soft-shoe moves are as tight as their comic timing.

Bottom line: This latest Cabaret Theatre offering is as good as it gets.

The satiric approach to such seemingly serious subjects as Adam and Eve—“Free food and frontal nudity, it must be paradise!”—the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and the Birth of Christianity ranges from mildly profane to the extremely profane, as when Mother Mary complains to Gandhi’s Mom, “After all the loaves and fishes, who did all the dishes?”

Political correctness seems to have been consciously, and happily, sacrificed on an altar of pure pragmatism. This is all about the laughs, as when the history of Native Americans on Manhattan Island is told through the eyes of Pocahontas and Minnehaha at the Algonquin Hotel on the prowl for their soul mates.

Since we’re talking two men here, the success of a show spotlighting a number of history’s heroines depends on how well they pull off drag. And these guys have it down. Not only does he have the moves impersonating the veiled Nefertiti with a lampshade for a headdress, Land plays the world’s “first diva” as a sexy soul sistah! Carwithen matches him later, camping it up as Queen Isabella.

Perhaps the funniest scene has our boys playing Napoleon and Josephine as Sonny and Cher.

The intimate and elegant set, by the way, is pretty much the same as it was for the last production here, the Cole Porter revue, “Let’s Misbehave.” While this may well have been merely the company’s clever way of cutting costs—it’s even identified in the program as the very same apartment, 75 years later—it worked well, enhancing the homey sense of familiarity and cozy comfort that this space so naturally affords.

With playfulness aplenty, this production continues through May 27.