It’s tempting to call All In: Comedy About Love a cynical cash grab — charging up to $800 apiece for a show that plops four recognizable names in armchairs to read short stories aloud to an audience of suckers. Even a week into performances, many of the first crop of stars were still reading from binders, occasionally stumbling over the wording of writer Simon Rich’s reliably clever turns of phrase. The rotating roster of celebs is the chief draw here, and the first grouping of John Mulaney, Fred Armisen, Richard Kind, and Renée Elise Goldsberry played very much to type in a grab-bag of short yarns of the sort that you’d expect from the front pages of The New Yorker (where, indeed, many of them were first published).

There’s a story about illiterate pirates (Mulaney and Armisen) who discover that a little girl (Goldsberry) has stowed away aboard their ship and inspires them to become improbably doting parental figures. Another focuses on the Grim Reaper (Armisen again) visiting an eightysomething Hollywood talent agent (Kind) who cleverly tries to postpone his inevitable demise by trying to sign Death as a client. In the noirish “The Big Nap,” a toddler detective (Mulaney) is hired by his baby sister (Goldsberry) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her toy unicorn, Moo-Moo.

If you’re expecting fully staged sketches of the sort you’d see on Saturday Night Live (where Rich was a writer for many years), think again. The cast aren’t so much performers as readers, delivering their lines like voice actors in a Pixar film while clutching their scripts. They’re planted in cozy chairs strategically placed downstage on a set (by David Korins) that resembles a hipster living room in some exposed-brick loft space. The low demands on the performers may explain how producers were able to book stars like Jimmy Fallon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and more to tag-team in for stints as short as five days.

Rich is a gifted humor writer, with a literary approach that’s more likely to draw nods of appreciation than belly laughs. He thrives on non sequiturs (Armisen’s pirate is randomly described as lactose intolerant), quirky asides, and surface cleverness (“I handed her a crayon so she could take notes,” Mulaney’s pint-size shamus says). He sometimes contents himself with setting up a clever premise, like a series of Missed Connections ads for dogs (“I was wearing a gold collar and tried to mount you”), without fleshing out the idea or subverting our expectations of where the plot might go. Like many an SNL writer, Rich can stumble trying to wrap things up. When a sketch does have a purposeful ending, it tends to be a verbal callback rather than an O. Henry-style narrative surprise. Indeed, many of his stories veer into a treacly, middlebrow sentimentality in the final lines.

Mulaney, who opens the show with a standup-style routine about a guy who walks into a bar with a seriously hard-of-hearing genie granting garbled wishes, seems to be channeling an earlier era of comic performer on stage. The sort who told “So a guy walks into a bar” jokes to appreciative crowds in casino ballrooms or Borscht Belt dinner theaters. And the rest of the cast, too, throw themselves into this old-fashioned material with a relaxed professionalism (aside from Kind’s strained attempts at a British accent in one sketch) that reminded me one of those old chestnuts from that earlier era of comedy: A hunter discovers a naked woman in the woods. “Are you game?” he asks. “Yes,” she says. So he shoots her.

But there’s a gap between being game and being entertaining — especially at inflated Broadway prices. Director Alex Timbers tries to amp up the production with cartoon projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) and occasional smoke and lighting effects (by Jake DeGroot) but there’s an underlying laziness to the staging that makes the show feel slight even before you note the 85-minute running time. Call it sit-down comedy. Timbers further pads the production with a handful of charming little song-lets, written by Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields and performed by the husband-and-wife musicians known as the Bergsons (along with three additional musicians, on cello, keyboard, and additional guitars). The best of these numbers have an edge that the rest of All In lacks, as in one tune about the contours of a longtime relationship: “I always say I love you when I mean turn out the lights.” ★★☆☆☆

ALL IN: COMEDY ABOUT LOVE
Hudson Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 85 minutes, no intermission
Tickets on sale through Feb. 16