werkz advice: good first act, lackluster second.

There aren't too many ways in which I'm pop-culturally illiterate. Network television, unfortunately, seems to be one of those gaps, especially growing up as a kid. So I never saw ABC's "Perfect Strangers"...or Balki, played by Bronson Pinchot. He's now part of a one-two combo of fairly gifted actors starring in a version of "Stones in his Pockets", a fairly succesfull London play about a movie filmed in Ireland, and the adventures of two extras on the set. The rub? A local boy-dreamer commits suicide, and on stage, both main actors play every role (at least a dozen different characters between the two of them).

If this sounds complex, it is. The sheer feat of two guys playing a bunch of different people with no costume or lighting changes was incredible. Sure, it's a gimmick, but it's a good one in the hands of Pinchot and his co-star, Tim Ruddy. Both are able to generate plenty of laughs throughout the performance. The real downer, sad to say, is the actual plot. The mad-cap insanity of the first act is tempered by the death of a local kid who dreamed too large for the small town, who ends his life Woolf style in a river. Each time the mood grew somber, somethings seemed wrong, as one of the characters themselves mouthed "People don't watch movies to be depressed...that's what the theatre is for!" I love self-referential humor, yet the show was quite amusing and the moments of sobriety seemed out of joint.

Pinchot, despite being incredibly funny, also lost focus a bit near the end of the second act, his faux-irish accent becoming increasingly ethereal. Of course, given the sheer number of scenes, characters and voices employed by both men, keeping it up for an entire performance is probably a hit and miss arrangement. (Interestingly, the understudy was billed as being able to play either part...a feat in and of itself.) In the end, Stones falls flat on the drama scale, but still scores well for humor. I'm not sure how the London version managed to keep people amused during the second act, but if it were up to me, I'd probably have kept things lighthearted and the audience rolling in the aisles. It may not be a movie, but some audiences like laughter on the stage as well.