I haven’t been to the theater in a long time, but thanks to a secret benefactor, I was able to see two shows this week, both star vehicles. The first, I’ll Eat You Last, was an amusing trifle starring Bette Midler as the once legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers. As a decades-long fan of Midler and her flamboymant, brassy, over-the-top, vulgar (But true! and generous! and kind!) brilliance, it was fun to see her play the flamboyant, brassy, over-the-top, vulgar, true, generous, kind and brilliant Mengers. About eighty minutes long, with lots of smutty punchlines, a few good anecdotes, and really expensive tickets, it’s almost certainly making everybody concerned fistsful of dollars.
The second play, Lucky Guy, starred Tom Hanks as the 
newspaper columnist Mike McAlary. I expected to hate it, since it was by Nora Ephron, and I find most of what Ephron has written for the screen to be cloyingly sentimental, with performances that suck you in with a kind of dazzle and stories that ultimately leave you feeling like you’ve read a Hallmark card. And do you know what? This show was highly sentimental, and I . . .kind of. . . liked it. And it was cloying, just the same. But three things really worked. First, the performances were good: Hanks, Peter Gehrity, Maura Tierney, Courtney B. Vance and especially Chrstopher McDonald. Second, Ephron very adroitly dovetailed the rise and fall and ultimate death of Mike McAlary with the rise and heyday and fall and soon-to-be death of tabloid newspapers, and it was well done–very well perceived. Second, George Wolfe‘s energetic, flashy staging really worked for me. The play was odd–lots of loud, vulgar language, lots of speed, lots of action. In many, many scenes, actors broke the fourth wall and speaking loudly, talked directly to the audience, narrating the story. After a while, I got it–the actors were playing newspapermen, and they were acting like the papers they wrote for, shouting at you from the newsstand, shouting to get your attention, shouting to make you hear the story they had to tell. The play was very much a love letter to a way of life that has all but disappeared. Maybe you had to be in journalism to fully commit to the play, to overlook its faults. But I was in journalism. I read those papers. And I liked the play.