Lucille Ball continued getting standing ovations whenever she turned up on late-night talk shows, despite the fact that audiences had soundly rejected her final TV series and movie. The goodwill created during the early 1950s run of I Love Lucy continued up until her death in 1989, and that glow helps sustain a touring production built around the filming of two Lucy episodes. Without it, the rewards of I Love Lucy Live on Stage could easily tip from assets to deficits on an entertainment spreadsheet.
I Love Lucy was a situation comedy in the true sense of the term, and while more recent TV show such as Seinfeld, Friends, and Modern Family are still labeled as sitcoms, their humor comes more from snappy repartee than putting the characters through variations on the same situations. Watching the two episodes that make up Lucy Live, it can be surprising to note how little of the humor actually comes from clever dialogue as opposed to characters reacting in tried and true �" and, yes, welcome �" fashion to situations the scriptwriters provided.
But audiences continued to embrace Lucy for decades because the scripts so deftly capitalized on the talents of the performers and the lived-in rapport of the characters they played. It's an impossible recipe to recreate, so the goal can only be to closely play the nostalgia card through literal replication, with hints of added emphasis on the touchstones. As in, an almost heralded reading of "Lucy, you got some splainin' to do."
Overall, the cast at the Curran Theatre does a commendable job as they zero in on inflections, gestures, demeanors, and expressions that do recall Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley. The show works best when, respectively, Thea Brooks, Euriamis Losada, Lori Hammel, and Kevin Remington are allowed to just do their stuff. The two episodes chosen from 190 possibilities aren't necessarily among the best, but they do concentrate mainly on the four principals, involve some musical numbers, and provide opportunities for broad physical comedy �" a skill that Brooks, our Lucy, has in abundance.
In an effort both to replicate a TV studio's experience in 1953 and to pad out the evening, creator/adapters Kim Flagg and Rick Sparks have added some hit-and-miss material that comes between the actual Lucy scenes. Mark Christopher Tracy plays a warm-up announcer, typical for TV show shot before a live audience, and his aggressive energy rings amusingly true for at least a while. But the cornball jokes, some involving a plant in the audience, come with diminishing returns. And while the breaks during scene changes featuring an ensemble singing commercial jingles are fun at first, one might come to dread the scene changes if it means the Crystal Tone Singers are going to emerge once again. The device, thankfully, falls increasingly by the wayside as the evening moves on.
The behind-the-scenes peeks at television magic that our host promises are severely undercut by the licensing restrictions forbidding the names or personalities of the actors who played Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred from being invoked. When scenes end and the actors go about their business, they are required to be ciphers. It's a redacted experience that winds up working best when the production doesn't suggest there ever was a world outside the TV land of Lucy.
I Love Lucy Live on Stage will run through Nov. 23 at the Curran Theatre. Tickets are $45-$135. Call (888) 746-1799 or go to shnsf.com.