Buyer & Cellar

Reviewed by Pauline Adamek
Mark Taper Forum
Through Aug. 17

Photo by Joan Marcus

Sweet and snarky, with a few cheap shots and a lot of belly laughs, Buyer & Cellar is a hilarious one-person show about a struggling actor’s brief period of working for a major celebrity.

Like a boyish and playful pixie, Michael Urie bounds onto the sparsely furnished all-white stage and regales us with an episode that he coyly hastens to assure us “is a work of fiction.” He claims he’s going to play a guy named Alex More in a made-up play written by Jonathan Tolins. “The premise is a little preposterous,” Urie insists, with all the enthusiasm of a person striving to dodge a nasty lawsuit. Of course, we’re all conspiratorially brought into his little joke.

Without altering his persona — that of a charming young gay guy — eventually he reveals that the other main character in his story is Barbra Streisand. Urie also claims he doesn’t perform impressions. “I don’t ‘do’ her, I’ll just be her in conversation,” he promises. “None of this is real,” he reminds us once again. Indeed, his impression of Barbra is of a hunched over, wry-smiling and murmuring older woman who flicks her hair and rolls her tongue around her mouth. It’s more like a drag queen’s muted version of Cher than anything else, but it works.

When Alex is fired from a job at Disneyland, he learns of another retail job at a private home in Malibu. Apparently Barbra Streisand has accrued so many hundreds of things that she has a small street of shops in a basement beneath the large barn on her coastal property. There’s a doll shop, an antique clothing shop and a “gift shoppe” — including a popcorn machine and a frozen yogurt stand.

Alex is hired to work at the “mall” in case any customers visit. Of course, practically the only customer who does call in is the mistress of the house. Her visits and their exchanges become increasingly bizarre and outrageous.

Winking at us throughout, Urie’s deliciously bitchy digs and inventive metaphors, his sardonic phrasing, dramatic pauses and occasional grimaces underscore his monologue, adding a hint of a spiteful subtext. Alex remarks on the “totalitarian precision of the display” as everything is arranged “just so.” When he finally gets invited into Barbra’s mansion, Alex remarks how the relentless good taste and total lack of financial restraint creates an overwhelming impression.

The rapid fire jabs and colorful metaphors are almost too clever, but there’s enough sweetness in Urie’s winsome performance that the jokes never sour.

Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Dwntwn.; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m. (213) 628-2772, centertheatregroup.org