This worked in “Citizen Kane,” but between Robert Redford’s speech in “Indecent Proposal” and this one in “Ballyhoo,” something has been lost in the digression.Īs the evening’s dimwit clowns, Harris and Reeves seemed especially popular with the audience at the Canon Theatre. The play’s low point comes later when Goetz has to recall his one love in life: a young woman he used to see on a trolley years ago but never spoke to. He and the understated Gayheart have a lovely moment on the couch where they first fall in love. Also fine is Mark Kassen’s Joe, who, fortunately, is not straddled with one of the production’s all-purpose Southern accents. Perlman’s nasty Boo is a needed respite among all this sentimental goo. What can you expect from a playwright, who, in his “Miss Daisy,” found some wonderful character arc as an old white woman who went from refusing her black chauffeur to “pass water” to letting him spoon-feed her pie? In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” the Freitag family goes from decorating a Christmas to pronouncing “shabat shalom.” Something odd, though, happens: When it comes to asking a girl to the big Ballyhoo dance, Joe goes right for the conventionally beautiful Sunny and rejects the “Jewish looking” (Uhry’s words) Lala. Which is why Joe (Mark Kassen), a New York Jew, falls in love with the blond, beautiful Sunny (she eventually makes it home from college) and teaches everybody about their heritage. Other than the looks department, however, they don’t really know they’re Jews.
Whichever group it is, the Freitags think they belong to the good-looking one. He reads the newspaper, which is how we know about Hitler and, in his opinion, the difference between German Jews, Russian Jews and Czechoslovakian Jews.
Boo’s unmarried brother, Adolph (Peter Michael Goetz), is the intellectual in the family. Those that remain belong to klutzy Lala, who merely flunked out of college because she’s so dim. Reba is the card of the group, and since she’s a borderline moron, gets all the laughs. Between tinsel-blowing, Reba knits a sweater for her daughter, Sunny (Rebecca Gayheart), who is away at college but will return for the holiday - Christmas, not Hanukkah. She knows that tinsel goes on one at a time, and if you hold a strand up in the air and then blow, it creates a real natural effect. Sister-in-law Reba (Harriet Harris) is the tinsel expert. Daughter Lala (Perrey Reeves) wants to put a big shiny star up on top, but her mother, Boo (Rhea Perlman), reminds the girl, “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” Boo is the sensible one, albeit bitter to the core. When “Ballyhoo” opens, the Freitag family is having a little problem decorating their Christmas tree.
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