Aug 1, 2008

'Drinking' a fine comic cocktail

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

Carrie Fisher drank too much. She also took a lot of drugs. Fisher tells us about some of this in her bawdy and exhibitionistic solo show "Wishful Drinking," in a short run at the San Jose Repertory Theatre through Saturday.

Fisher, of course, is most famous for playing the part of Princess Leia in "Star Wars," and also for being the daughter of Hollywood's Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.

Fisher begins her show with the line, "Hi, I'm Carrie Fisher, and I'm an alcoholic." She then launches in to the story of waking up in bed one morning next to a gay man who turns out to be dead from an OxyContin overdose.

Soon the story segues into the marital drama of her parents, Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, who served as maid of honor and best man at the wedding of good friends Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd, only to have Eddie later run off with Taylor. Carrie follows this with an amusing chalk talk on Hollywood marriage, divorce and inbreeding.

The show has many quirky asides, including stories of Fisher's mother buying her and her grandmother each vibrators one Christmas, and father Eddie swallowing his new miniature hearing aids with a glass of water one morning, mistaking them for pills.

Carrie's 12-year relationship to singer Paul Simon gets some time, along with her addiction to Percodan, codeine and other narcotics. "Religion is the opiate of the masses," she says, "I took masses of opiates religiously."

On opening night in San Jose, Fisher came onstage in silhouette at the top of the show, looking strikingly like her mother. She's put on a few pounds since the Princess Leia days, and has some miles on her.

Surprisingly, Fisher had trouble remembering her lines on opening night. The performance felt like an early preview. By way of explanation, Fisher said she'd been undergoing shock treatment for manic depression, known these days as bi-polar disorder, and that the treatment had erased her memory. In any event, the performance suffered for it.

The pacing of the show, which needs to move crisply with good comedic timing, suffered from repeated unsettling moments of memory loss. Onstage, Fisher spent a lengthy segment going through the history of her mental illness, and mining it for comedic material.

Fisher's 2006 solo show opened this spring at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a new restaging overseen by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone. The San Jose stint is stage two of a five-city tour. The show has been on hiatus for a month, and is now just getting cranked up again.

What's interesting is to compare Fisher's show to the one-woman show her mother brought through the South Bay four years ago. The two shows, both entertaining, are remarkably similar. Fisher tells us, in fact, in "Wishful Drinking" that she has performed on and off in her mother's shows since the age of 13.

Reynolds' South Bay show, which played at the Heritage Theatre in Campbell, included bits from about 30 songs, amusing stand-up stage patter about bad husbands, catty impressions of Hollywood divas, and a raft of surprisingly lewd jokes. Basically, it was an hour and a half of clowning around, and Reynolds was good at it.

As far as any current interest in marriage goes, Reynolds remarked in her Campbell show, "I've retired from that. I've closed the store. Let it rust." The audience loved it. It's easy to see where Fisher learned her bawdy, chatty stagecraft.

If you're a fan of gossipy Hollywood trash talking, you'll enjoy both the mother and the daughter's show. Reynold's touring dates can be found at her Web site: debbiereynolds.com. Fisher's "Wishful Drinking" concludes this weekend in San Jose.

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.