Time for a theater review. The Reprise! series here in L.A. is doing Pippin, the 1972 Broadway show which starred Bob Fosse's staging. The story has something to do with the son of King Charlemagne, Pippin by name, who tries to find some meaning in life via various means. He tries study and war and drugs and since this is a Bob Fosse musical, he tries sex a number of different ways. Mostly, he tries singing "Corner of the Sky" every eight minutes. His life, as it evolves, is told by a nimble narrator character called Leading Player who was originally played by Ben Vereen, and who in this production is played by Sam Harris. As near as I can tell, what you have is Harris playing Vereen playing the Leading Player who plays God and Bob Fosse, not necessarily in that order. (Pippin is played by a gent named Michael Arden, who I never saw before but he's awfully good. Most of the cast is awfully good, especially Conrad John Schuck as King Charlemagne and Mimi Hines in a brief star turn as Pippin's Grandma.)
So did I like it? Yeah, some of it. But there was an awful lot I didn't like, most of it in the second act when Pippin's rather simple-minded quest to do something "extraordinary" with his life seems to ramble and move in contrived directions. By the last twenty minutes, I was squirming in my seat and wishing someone would just tell Pippin to grow up, then bring Mimi Hines out to do her wonderful number from Act One again.
As far as I can tell, my problems with it were with the basic play, not with this expert production of it, which was directed by Gordon Hunt. Gordon, who I used to work with at Hanna-Barbera, did something more extraordinary than poor Pippin ever achieves, just by getting this show up and running and looking as polished as it does, all in the limited rehearsal time of a Reprise! staging. I guess I admired everything about the show but the show, itself.