Act Your Wage: The Pink Slip and Fall of an Automotive CEO

Having missed Kwame a River and Kwame a River 2: The Wrath of Conyers, the highly lauded predecessors to Andiamo Novi's latest installment in the local-spoof canon, I have no basis of comparison for Act Your Wage: The Pink Slip and Fall of an Automotive CEO. This 60-minute comedy attempts to lampoon greedy, inept auto executives, a topic in which Southeast Michigan has been actively entrenched for months upon months, but shies away from openly mocking; the resulting vague and allegoric premise — albeit mixed in with some great bits — is tepid where it might have scorched.

Fittingly for a production on a former Second City stage, Act Your Wage is strikingly similar to a Second City revue, with a bare set, jump-cuts and other familiar scenic devices, nods to audience suggestions, and a handful of musical numbers. Yet this production puts story first, requiring expository and transitional scenes that aren't always funny; moreover, the story itself is pretty messy. CEO loses job, loses car, loses wife, is briefly introduced to how the other half lives (supposedly in order to "gain perspective," a eureka moment that never quite materializes), panics about money, flails about for a new job, and finds his calling just in time for the finale. Themes are embraced, then put on hold for another narrative thread. The script can't decide whether it wants to deliver a coherent story or just string together as many hilarious scenes as possible, and instead falls short of both.

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Happy Season to You, Acquaintance Name

Christmas fatigue is not an acceptable excuse to pass on Happy Season to You, Acquaintance Name. Although this Abreact comedy was originally slated for a December run, the story is more about office politics than Yuletide anything — the holiday setting is primarily a heightening device. It stands to reason that if being snowed in at the office is bad, then being snowed in at the office on Christmas Eve is a special form of torture.

It's supposed to be the last day at work for Jason (Travis Grand), but after manager Bonnie (Michelle Becker) forces him and the few remaining employees to wait out their shifts despite the bad weather, the whole gang is stuck indefinitely with no one but a new young security guard to protect — or unintentionally menace — them. The players are confined to the employee break room, a dreary little place carefully appointed with touches of banality any office worker will appreciate. (Thanks to whoever butchered the "Youre Mother Doesnt Work Hear" notice and hung near-identical posters of waterfalls, one labeled SERENITY and the other SERVICE, expertly setting the tone.)

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The Last Five Years

Musicals get away with being fluffy. A man and a woman singing prettily at each other — the bar is set low. This is why the heartfelt The Last Five Years from Magenta Giraffe Theatre will soar past everyone's expectations. The small-scale piece by writer/composer Jason Robert Brown, sharply conceived and beautifully executed, delivers such exquisite sadness that your heart may explode.

The musical has just two characters, Cathy (Anne Marie Damman) and Jamie (Kevin Young); their romantic relationship has an expiration date. When the play opens, Cathy bitterly sings that it's over, yet in Jamie's reality, they've just met. From the opposite ends of their five years together, they bookend each other: he moves forward in time; she goes back. Although they occasionally share the stage, the characters mostly occupy it alone for alternating songs; there is relatively little dialogue, but a variety of  ballads and some up-tempo, rock-adjacent numbers. The concept allows us to primarily see each character feeling alone within a relationship, revealing well-earned undercurrents of pain and second guessing, and making the few points of connection all the more bittersweet. Director Frannie Shepherd-Bates takes excruciating care to develop the individuals as well as the couple, constructing believable love and loss — simultaneously — between two people who almost never address each other. The staging weaves the two actors together without being intrusive, there are no lazy choices, and everything clicks.

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A Forbidden Broadway Christmas

A Forbidden Broadway Christmas springs from the Forbidden Broadway mold; if the original was successful, why shouldn't they make money off a Christmas-themed sequel? It's the very kind of business decision creator/writer Gerard Alessandrini would have mocked, had he not made it himself. In its third year at the Gem Theatre, this bastard child of the Broadway machine features spectacular voices paying homage to the genre, even as it bites back with literal and figurative Grinchiness.

The bread and butter of this cabaret-style production is the tunes, favorites spanning decades of Broadway history. Some songs are paired with their respective shows, as in an extended Les Miserables medley, but more unexpected and creative choices are revealed when, for example, Gypsy's "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" is reworded to address the industry's recent puppetry fad. Topics range from Christmas to the economy to more specific barbs aimed at Broadway's producers and divas, but you don't have to know who Cameron Mackintosh is (trust me, I didn't) to appreciate a song about the merchandising craze. Over the course of its two hours, the show does run a few concepts into the ground — yes, okay, Disney is everywhere! — but overall there is a decent balance of Christmas-specific parody along with the Broadway commentary, plus a hefty dose of riotous celebrity impressions for impressions' sake. The material is strong enough that I didn't mind the repetition, and each number offers something that the others don't.

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The Big Bang

The premise is almost disarming: performers Greg Trzaskoma and Brian Thibault (using their actual names) have written a musical. An expensive, bloated Titanic of an epic musical — ship or film, both apply. And they're pitching it to you, their audience of potential investors and sponsors.

Such is The Big Bang, the title of both the "proposed" show and this current offering by the Jewish Ensemble Theater. It brings something new to the genre, a fine solution to the problem of staging a traditional musical: all the people, the costumes, the orchestra! Here, Stacy Cleavland doubles as music director and the third cast member, single-handedly providing live accompaniment and delivering a few great jokes of her own. Director Mary Bremer establishes immediate contact between performers and audience that completely blurs the lines of pre-show and the play's start, delightfully heightening the unconventional portrayal. The conceit of pitching the play instead of performing it also allows for numerous descriptions of the artists' visions for the final product, each as gaudy and costly as a Las Vegas revue.

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