Revivals are a tricky thing. There are particular challenges when mounting solo pieces long associated with a single performer (who frequently is the author). In recent years, we’ve gotten new productions of Jane Wagner’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (with SNL alum Cecily Strong gamely taking on the role that Lily Tomlin made famous), Jay Presson Allen’s Tru (with Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Truman Capote), and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 — where Smith’s docu-style monlogue morphed into an ensemble piece for a four-person cast.
But what do you do when the original star is embedded in the title? The Whoopi Monologues, which opened Monday at Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, reconceives Whoopi Goldberg’s award-winning 1983 routine as a series of solo character sketches for five women, with some interstitial elements that enable the cast to interact with each other before disappearing behind upstage dressing room doors (set design by Studio Bent). Goldberg, who brought the show to Broadway in 1984 under the mentorship of Mike Nichols and won a Grammy for the resulting album, updated it for a 2004 Broadway revival.
There’s an inevitable datedness to the material, with its references to Dick Cheney and Sex and the City. Even in the 1980s, the opening monologue’s admittedly amusing riffs about airline food would have been at home on the Borscht Belt of an an even earlier generation. But White’s production does make a case for Goldberg as a playwright and sharp creator of character. She allows a troupe of well-trained actors to embody a group of women who emerge as distinct entities with a shared gift of self-possession and yearning for something slightly better in their lives.
Danielle Pinnock (Ghosts) dials up the bawdiness and a fulsome Jamaican accent as a woman who becomes the unlikely mistress of an 80-year-old man she dubs “The Raisin.” She even flashes a silky black negligee (costumes by Qween Jean). Kecia Lewis (Hell’s Kitchen) charges through the evolution of women’s sanitary health products and offers an extended riff on menopause that mostly succeeds (the actress called for her next line several times at my performance).
Many of the routines take a turn toward sentimentality or pathos toward the end — with mixed results. Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah) serves up wide-eyed adorability as a “gonna be 7”-year-old Black girl who wears a long-sleeved white shirt on her head in her longing to be blonde — and white. She sweetly approaches audience members to feel their hair before deciding, as you probably guessed, that being Black might not be so bad after all. Kerry Washington (Scandal), who is only performing through August 2, nails a Valley Girl accent as a teenage surfer girl facing an unexpected pregnancy. But given how abbreviated her segment is, her graphic description of a self-induced abortion offers little more than narrative shock.
She might not be as a big a name as her co-stars, but Tony winner Kara Young (Purpose) is the real standout here. She opens the show with the longest monologue, a discursive, tangent-filled yarn about a motor-mouthed junkie and thief who claims to have a PhD in history from Columbia and enthusiastically visits the Anne Frank House after fleeing to Amsterdam after a recent score. Young leans into the physicality of the street-wise Fontaine, literally, contorting her limber body in exaggerated reactions while interacting with the audience. Hitting her punchlines like a Golden Gloves champ, she almost convinces me that this character might have existed in the real world. I would gladly have watched this human spitfire playing all five roles.
The question is not whether these joke-laced routines work without Whoopi Goldberg. They do, especially performed here by a first-rate cast with an innate sense of comedic timing. Instead, the issue is how well these sketches hold up four (or two) decades after their creation. (Goldberg herself dropped two monologues from the original 1984 Broadway show for the last revival, and added the one that Lewis performs.) There’s a sketchiness that’s built into the format. But part of the initial appeal, that Goldberg was embodying this grab-bag of wildly different personalities, is lost in the new format. But as a showcase for a quintet of gifted comedic actresses, The Whoopi Monologues still delivers. ★★★★☆
THE WHOOPI MONOLOGUES
LCT Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 30 for $123 to $183