Triple Espresso
State Theatre, through May 14
Running Time: 2 hrs
Triple Espresso is a coffee bar, and for the last 20 years, Hugh Butternut has been the piano player there. To celebrate his anniversary, he wants to reunite the old trio he used to be part of and resolve an old conflict with his two old friends. As premises go, this one’s somewhat of a stretch, but the premise in this imported Equity production is just an excuse, really. The caffeine theme is as well. Nayna Ramey’s set is literally a theatrical mosaic, combining relatively small squares of pink, green, red, and orange in different combinations. With a city backdrop cleverly composed of cups and saucers and a gorgeous piano filling the stage, it’s all lit quite pleasingly by Michael Klaers, but, like the “story,” it’s just window-dressing. This show is really about allowing three performers to strut their stuff.
What they do is variety, vaudeville. One’s a singer, one’s a comedian, and one’s a magician. Joe Gautier is the comedian, Bobby Bean, and while it took me a while to warm up to him, it must have been me that was doing the warming up. Gautier has a rubber face and body, and he does a tremendous amount of schtick, leading the audience in a sing-along as a young guitar player, performing a shadow-puppet show, and doing an extended ape sequence that floored me. The magic is the usual cups and balls and mind-reading card tricks, but it’s all done quite well by Charles Peters as Buzz Maxwell, and magic done well is always fun. Danny Jacobs plays Hugh Butternut, doing a comic lounge-singer riff you’ve seen before, which he does well enough, but what he does really well is play and sing. At one point, taking requests from the audience, Jacobs broke into Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” I’m always stunned when I hear a singer take a famous song and make it his own, and that’s what Jacobs did. He didn’t sing the whole song – what comic lounge singer ever does? – but after hearing him sing the beginning, I wanted him to.
Leave ’em wantin’ more.
The script, written by Bill Arnold, Michael Pearce Donley, and Bob Stromberg, provides tremendously entertaining set-pieces, and it’s interesting that William Partlan directs every presentation of the show worldwide. (The show has long-running productions in Minneapolis and San Diego, plus assorted versions that tour.) And beyond the singing and magic and comedy, the actors take what I consider to be tremendous risks as they play out and resolve their conflict, often letting silence and stillness set in and introducing truly uncomfortable moments. Still, the story just didn’t gel for me because I wasn’t sure what I was watching. Much of it is told in a kind of flashback, but was it flashback, or were they really playing this stuff out or what? And was my confusion due to the script or to the way it was being handled, or was I just confused? While I never resolved those questions, they ultimately were of little consequence. The show is really about three expert entertainers having fun. And they do. And so did I.
This article appears in May 5 • 2006.