We’re all familiar with the sketches that air during the final half hour of Saturday Night Live, the ones that start with a half-decent premise but outstay their welcome and only cling to our memory if the cast manages to get one of their scene partners to break character. Not Ready for Prime Time, a new stage show depicting the early days of the 50-year-old TV institution, has a similar vibe. Unlike Ivan Reitman’s 2024 movie Saturday Night, which smartly narrowed its focus to the show’s first night and the struggle to corral a madcap bunch of TV newbies for a live broadcast, this one suffers from unfocused sprawl by trying to cover the period from 1975 to 1989, everything from show creator Lorne Michaels’ initial struggles to launch the show to the departure of Chevy Chase after the improbably successful first season to Belushi’s gone-too-soon death in 1982 to the time just beyond.
The show begins with Ian Bouillion’s Michaels narrating the challenges he faced assembling the original cast — and frequently breaking the fourth wall to offer historic footnotes, like the fact that Chevy Chase’s given name was Cornelius and that he turned to comedy after playing drums for Steely Dan in its early days. Director Conor Bagley’s nine-member cast has the unenviable task of trying to live up to real-world legends, and they manage to create versions of the originals that are just recognizable enough to make this pop culture history lesson work on a rudimentary level, especially in the scenes that aren’t set on Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center.
The script, by Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers, faces another challenge that Reitman didn’t: trying to capture the comedic genius of those early episodes without actually having the rights to the material (which Reitman seems to have obtained for his film). What the play does instead is produce watered-down parodies of some of SNL‘s breakthrough bits, like the absurdist original cold open in which a professor (head writer Michael O’Donoghue, not depicted in the play) teaches English to a marble-mouthed immigrant (John Belushi) with a bunch of oddball phrases you won’t find on Duolingo (“I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines”). Here, the show subs in Dan Aykroyd (Kristian Lugo) and Laraine Newman (Taylor Richardson) and has Belushi (Ryan Crout) sound mysteriously like Andy Kaufman as he repeats phrases like “Please use my face as a bean bag chair.”
Another facsimile has Morris, who smarted at being a Juilliard-trained performer relegated to secondary roles that often leaned on Black stereotypes, doing a version of his memorable “News for the Hard of Hearing” bit where he shouts out whatever “Weekend Update” anchor Chevy Chase has just said. Here, though, Grimes is stuck serving as a “Honky-to-Jive” translator (“Check it, ’cause this is the real lowdown…”) that does little more than underscore how clichéd the material was for both Morris and Grimes.
Grimes is easily the standout among the cast, giving a real sense of poignancy to Morris’ battles with institutional biases from the all-white staff — a challenge he shared in a sense with the women on the cast, whose efforts to inject a feminist edge into their material was casually dismissed. The show’s true laugh-out-loud moment involves a double-entendre-laden sketch in which Newman, Gilda Radner (Evan Rubin), and Jane Curtin (Caitlin Houlahan, delivering the grounded energy of a prim, married suburbanite) enthuse over the “perfect man” — which turns out to be a blow-up doll played by Lugo’s Aykroyd, who winds up manhandled and deflated. Naturally, the network rejects the bit as “too feminist” — which is a shame, especially since they name the doll “Cornelius” in another dig at Chase, who exited SNL after the first season for a film career that produced more early flops than hits.
A good deal of expense has been poured into the production, from the elaborate, tchotchke-laden, two-level set (by Christopher and Justin Swader) to Sarita P. Fellows’ mod costume designs, to the live four-piece band that plays classic rock and pop tunes both during the show and in the pre-show and intermission periods. (Mextly Couzin’s lighting, however, leaves speaking characters in shadow at several key moments.)
Not Ready for Prime Time can’t decide what story it wants to tell, and winds up setting up too many plot threads over too many short scenes that never lead anywhere in particular. At two and a half hours, it recalls the overstuffed show that Michaels attempted to air that first night, before he was forced to radically slash the number of musical numbers and sketches (and even a planned stand-up routine by Billy Crystal). We see multiple characters smoking joints (including Michaels himself) and Newman hiding her heroin addiction and tourniquets — but how drugs enhanced or inhibited their creativity and livelihood remains a mystery. We also see Newman hooking up with Akyroyd behind the back of Radner, who then hooks up with Bill Murray (Nate Janis) after he joins the cast. (Akyroyd apparently comes up with the idea for the Coneheads sketch during a moment of inventive foreplay.) But again, this also plays more like gossip that doesn’t deepen our understanding of the people involved or what made them such stars.
I suspect there’s a really tight 90-minute show buried in here, one with a razor-sharp focus on what modern audiences should take away from SNL‘s origin story. (Personally, I’d watch an entire show about Garrett Morris, especially with Grimes proving such a riveting portrayal of a hyper-talented man who seemed forever just ahead of his time.) In addition to that revealing blow-up doll sketch, I admit that the show did have a second laugh-out-loud scene — but this one was entirely unscripted, when Proctor’s Chase pratfalls into the table where Michaels is sitting during auditions and breaks the tabletop loose from its central stand, forcing Bouillion and Nate Janis (who doubles as NBC exec Dick Ebersol) to prop it up with their knees for the remaining auditions. It’s a reminder of the antic mayhem that exemplifies SNL at its best, a willingness to just roll with it that’s only fitfully captured in Not Ready for Prime Time. ★★☆☆☆
NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME
MCC Theater Space, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 30 for $19 to $125
Culture Sauce 