The other Monday evening, three men in their forties were hanging out on the mezzanine of the Hudson Theatre, in midtown. They were John Mulaney, the comedian; Alex Timbers, the Broadway director; and Simon Rich, the writer. The three—two quite tall, one a bit shorter, all about equally floppy-haired—had gathered for the night’s performance of “All In,” a limited-run “comedy about love,” which Rich wrote, Timbers directed, and Mulaney stars in. Timbers, in an olive-green button-down, was examining the pictures on the wall. “This was when Elvis went on ‘The Steve Allen Show,’ and Allen humiliated him by making him sing ‘Hound Dog’ to a dog,” he said, of a large framed photograph of a mournful-looking young Presley standing beside an even more mournful-looking basset wearing a small top hat.
The Hudson was the first home to “The Steve Allen Show,” and also to the “Tonight Show,” back when it was hosted by Allen and, after him, Jack Paar. “Then Paar moved to 30 Rock,” Rich said. He was wearing a V neck and a black puffer coat. “And Carson started there in ’62, I think,” Mulaney added. Mulaney and Rich also got their start at 30 Rock, as young writers on “Saturday Night Live.” Rich was hired in 2007, a season that was mostly taken up by a writers’ strike. “The strike was a relief to me, because as long as it was going on, it meant I couldn’t get fired from ‘S.N.L.,’ ” he said. The first thing the two wrote together after Mulaney joined the show, a year later, was a parody commercial for benzodiazepine.
“The voice-over was, like, ‘Ask your doctor about this medication. Well, don’t ask him, because then he’ll know you want it,’ ” Mulaney said. “My favorite part was when the doctor writes the prescription and the voice-over goes, ‘Whoa, thirty!’ ”
Rich chimed in: “That’s sixty halves!”
Mulaney laughed.
Mulaney and Rich became good friends and collaborators, writing together often until Rich left “S.N.L.,” in 2011. “It was that perfect age of twenty-seven, where I would have never said out loud, ‘I’m gonna really miss you,’ ” Mulaney said. “The first time we really admitted to each other that we wanted to impress each other was in the fall of 2020. I was having all sorts of . . . I was in a rehabilitation facility, and we were talking on the phone outside.”
Rich broke in. “It was, like, ‘So . . . do you ever think about “S.N.L.”?’ ‘Oh, maybe every single day of my life.’ ”
This kind of push and pull toward intimacy and away from it stands at the heart of “All In.” The show consists of Mulaney and his co-stars, Richard Kind, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Fred Armisen, performing Rich’s absurdist, poignant love stories (most of which were previously published in this magazine). The gaps between the stories are punctuated by the Bengsons, the married musical duo, who sing songs from the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 masterwork, “69 Love Songs.” In “All In,” love is precarious to maintain between life partners, but also between friends and siblings. In one piece, Mulaney and Armisen play crusty pirates who struggle to co-parent a young stowaway; in another, Kind is a talent agent who signs the Grim Reaper, played by Armisen, as a client, in order to defer his own death and continue to care for his ailing wife; in yet another, Mulaney and Goldsberry play a toddler and his baby sister, reimagined as a Raymond Chandler-style P.I. and the mysterious dame begging for his help. Throughout, the actors wear street clothes and remain seated in armchairs, as if participating in a radio play. “We wanted to put the performers as downstage as possible, so they’re connected to the audience, to almost break the proscenium,” Timbers said. (Mulaney and his co-stars will be swapped out for a rotating group of other performers, including Nick Kroll, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Aidy Bryant.)
The trio decamped to Mulaney’s dressing room, which was a cozy jumble of books, shopping bags, and framed pictures of his two young children. It was almost time to get ready for the show, which for Mulaney meant little more than changing from the sweatpants and athletic shirt he had on to the slim suit he wears onstage. “I direct a lot of very elaborate musicals,” Timbers said. “But here we thought, Why don’t we take away the costumes and everything else, and ignite the audience’s imagination?”
Rich smiled. “This reminds me of a really dismissive thing Lorne Michaels likes to say when watching a sketch,” he said. “ ‘The wig is starring.’ Like, you’re leaning on a funny wig.”
Mulaney winced. “One time, after watching one of my sketches, he just looked at me and went, ‘Wig city.’ ”
“Wig city,” Rich repeated slowly, looking pained.
Timbers added brightly, “And here there’s no wig! There’s nothing to upstage the actors.”
Rich nodded in agreement. “It’s more Ricky Jay than Siegfried & Roy,” he said. ♦
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