Larry David, the man who turned a near-sociopathic mix of indignation and apathy into comic gold in Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, has opened his Broadway debut Fish in the Dark. He wrote the tale of a family behaving badly in the wake of a funeral, and takes one of the leads, and it is already a box office success with $14.5m in advance sales. But is it actually any good?
The Guardian’s Maraithe Thomas liked it well enough, though lamented: “While the set pieces are concocted with genius, and some, like a dilemma about whether or not to tip a doctor, turn toe-curling into an art form, they don’t come sublimely full circle in the way that David’s plots are known and praised for.” And there were similar criticisms from the rest of the press.
Ben Brantley, New York Times
During Fish, I laughed fully exactly once... Fish gives us archetypes as old as commedia dell’arte and one-liners as old as the Catskills. But credible, breathing, present-tense characters are nowhere to be found... Oh well. The audience I saw the show with seemed pretty, pretty happy and gave Mr. David a big fat kiss of a standing ovation.
Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal
A thimbleweight comedy... more in the nature of a well-remunerated personal appearance than an actual play... Imagine a Neil Simon play without a plot – or three bottom-drawer episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm hastily knocked together into a two-hour script – and you’ll get the idea. On stage, Mr. David is a self-caricature of a self-caricature. I’ve never seen anybody look less comfortable or more physically awkward in a starring role on Broadway. It isn’t a comic effect, either: He clearly doesn’t know what to do with himself up there other than fling his long arms around randomly.
Matt Wolf, Telegraph
Is the play itself any good? Possibly, if you want to watch a celebrity from one medium reprise material from another: a ‘pretty ... pretty’ reference arrives late in the second act to cheers from an adoring crowd fully au fait with its TV provenance. Others may wonder whether so scattershot a piece of writing would have got this far without its physically rangy, bespectacled star attached.
Tom Teodorczuk, Independent
From a brother-in-law determined to get his hands on the deceased’s Rolex watch to a loud, tactless uncle, Fish in the Dark swims in cliches. Until a preposterous second act subplot involving the maid’s son, Diego, and Gloria, the comedy stays true to life without ever saying anything significant about life.
Charles McNulty, LA Times
This gift for stringing together minuscule moments of frustration and fury — of making half-hour comedies out of pebbles in shoes — is ideally suited to the small screen. On the stage, however, the smallness and the shtickiness are clumsily magnified... This is an overextended sitcom that would like to become a farce but settles instead for some hoary Neil Simon middle ground.
Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
To say that David looks new to the dramaturgical game ain’t the half of it... Many [characters] seem there mostly to fill out one particular joke or riff... And a side benefit of such a busy casting director means that we get to enjoy a lot of variety and carefully honed zingers from folk with a lot of time to plan their missiles.
Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
David’s new stage comedy is like his 30-minute HBO show, only stretched out over two hours so that what is usually a cringe-worthy appetiser on TV has grown into a tedious and self-indulgent main course onstage... It opens with a masturbation joke, goes quickly into boob-groping and never moves far from a series of routines stitched together poorly.
Marylin Stasio, Variety
Instead of sticking to a conventionally constructed plot, this Fish swims from one comic situation to another — which may not make it much of a play. But there are plenty of laughs in the play’s minor comic questions... David may not be a convincing stage actor, but every word out of his mouth is funny. And he’s even funnier when he’s speechless — falling to his knees and throwing out his arms in thunderstruck disbelief at the sheer absurdity of everyone else in the room but him.
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
While David adheres to an old-fashioned Broadway model, he also lards the comedy with enough of his trademark brittle edge to prevent it from becoming too quaint. His liking for uncomfortable situations and annoying characters who are unskilled in diplomacy yields steady laughs throughout... It’s not exactly groundbreaking theater, but it all hangs together.
Richard Zoglin, Time
“Padded out, overpopulated (18 characters — enough for a Shakespeare history play!), and funny only in spurts... [David’s] whiny voice and perplexed expressions are perfectly sized for the small screen. Here he has to project his trademark shrug to the back of the mezzanine — hunching up his shoulders and stretching his arms so wide he looks like a seagull coming in for a landing at Kennedy Airport.”
Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
Aims for, but just misses, the lofty territory of great 1960s Broadway comedies... The best thing about the humour is that it’s also unembellished and played without irony. These are just people, often very obnoxious people, lurching through lives and oddball dilemmas.
Elysa Gardner, USA Today
Characters range from bellowing seniors to clueless millennials, and at times seem to have wandered in from different sitcoms. But the jokes do keep coming, and usually stick. If its humour can be predictably caustic, Fish’s tone is pleasingly light and flaky.
Jesse Green, Vulture
It’s well built, occasionally thoughtful, and consistently very funny if not transcendently so... It’s something of a surprise to find David so vigorously working such an old-fashioned comic vein... Much of the cast, including Rita Wilson as Brenda and Rosie Perez as Fabiana, was either too stiff or too loose. As a result, the pacing, though often quick and clippy, sometimes fell into weird longueurs, as if this were live TV... It’s going for something else, and almost gets there. Which is a complement, truly. We criticize because we care.
Sarah Seltzer, Flavorwire
I’m not sure if the play intentionally taps in to any sort of deeper meaning, but on the other hand, what’s more universal than a family squabbling over the legacy of someone they’ve lost? Whether or not David intended it, there’s meaning enough in reliving some of the sadder, and indeed more angry, moments of all our lives through the lens of humour.
Jeremy Gerard, Deadline
To sample an image from the show itself – a dining table laden with curated paninis, baby micro-greens, artisanal bagels, organic crudités and Diet Coke – the show is too much of a muchness... Of course, this is the age of binge-watching, so two hours of shtick can be satisfying. Or give you heartburn.
