Theater: Music Box Theatre / 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
In One Man, Two Guvnors, James Corden stars as "Francis Henshall" ("One Man"). Always-famished and easily-confused, Henshall agrees to work for a local gangster as well as a criminal in hiding ("Two Guvnors"), both of whom are linked in a tangled web of schemes and romantic associations... none of which Francis can keep straight. So he has to do everything in his power to keep his two guvnors from meeting while trying to eat anything in sight along the way. Simple.
Falling trousers, flying fish heads, star-crossed lovers, cross-dressing mobsters and a fabulous on-stage band are just some of what awaits at the most "deliriously funny" (The Daily Telegraph) new play to cross the pond in decades.
April 18, 2012: It’s a rich, slow-spreading smile, like butter melting in a skillet over a low flame. And whenever it creeps across James Corden’s face in the splendidly silly “One Man, Two Guvnors,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Music Box Theater, you know two things for sure: You’re in for trouble, and you’re already hooked. Struggle as you will, there ain’t nothing you can do about it.
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April 18, 2012: This season, the king of fools on Broadway may well be James Corden. The slapstick farce and British vaudevillian merriment galloping throughout the exuberant music-hall comedy, “One Man, Two Guvnors,” are a perfect fit for Corden’s range of expressive comedic abilities.
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April 18, 2012: The British import One Man, Two Guvnors — a larf-out-loud theatrical hubbub just as sparkling and marvelous as rapturous London reviews have promised — includes a helpful note in the playbill connecting commedia dell'arte of the 16th–18th centuries, British pantomimes and music hall revues of the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, and this dandy 21st-century National Theatre of Great Britain production.
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April 18, 2012: James Corden stars in Richard Bean's riotous reinvention of the commedia dell'arte classic, "The Servant of Two Masters," which transfers to Broadway in Nicholas Hytner's smash-hit London production.
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April 18, 2012: There are two directors -- one just for physical comedy -- in "One Man, Two Guvnors," the farce that arrived from London's irreproachable National Theatre with virtuosic clowning by James Corden and another lesson for us Yanks about the two kinds of British humor.
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April 18, 2012: Hunger, like all urgent and uncontrollable bodily functions, is an eternal wellspring of humor. Think of Charlie Chaplin grimly carving up his boot in The Gold Rush, Mr. Creosote’s last supper and that old, reliable sight gag, the fellow desert-islander who morphs into a talking turkey leg. Tummy rumbles equal belly laughs, and both abound in the National Theatre’s gobsmackingly funny One Man, Two Guvnors. Driven in its first half by the peckish desperation of freelance flunky Francis Henshall (James Corden), this virtuoso banquet of slapstick farce and verbal jousting brings with it a shocking revelation: How starved we were for comedy.
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