John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!
Description
**** [FOUR STARS] It takes a lot of ambition to spin a stage musical out of such elements as a feminist journalist, a wayward Navy pilot, the Cold War machinations of a Kennedy-esque White House, and a grudge match between Notre Dame’s football team and an Arabian kingdom. You might assume such an undertaking would be out of the reach of any Fringe Festival production--and to some extent, you'd be right. But if “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!”--adapted from his own novel by "The Exorcist" author William Peter Blatty--suffers from outsize ambition, it is also liberally sprinkled with clever touches. True, the musical numbers by Michael Garin, Robert Hipkins and Erik Frandsen are mostly forgettable--“That’s Diplomacy,” performed by the Presidential Cabinet, is a happy exception--and the show's 1960s setting gives it a heavy load of dated pop-culture references. (When one character asks, “Don’t you remember that Charles Laughton movie?,” the answer for most of the audience is surely “No.”) But the production wins bonus points for using its bare-bones budget to comic effect--its version of the Lincoln Memorial is especially hilarious--and Jay Klaitz, saddled with a wisp of a role as the show’s title character, John “Wrong Way” Goldfarb, saves his part with terrific vocals. There are also a number of pleasantly groanworthy puns: “I’ve grown accustomed to your fez," for instance, or a top CIA spook named Hanus Overreach. And if the latter name hits a bit too close to home, well, that's what the Fringe is for.--Scott Wooledge, Designer
