Theater review by Adam Feldman
Viagara Falls is not half bad; it is all bad. In this boneheaded sex comedy, co-author Lou Cutell plays the elderly, horny Charley, and Bernie Kopell is Moe, his depressed best friend of fifty years. They can’t go out for Charley’s birthday—“At my age, the only thing I’ll expand by going out are my hemorrhoids”—so they hire a prostitute and pop pills that will make them “harder than a Rumanian salami.” Soon, the jiggly, giggly Teresa Ganzel shows up as the menopausal Jacqueline, a whore with a heart of hoary one-liners. “I’ve got what they call the furniture disease,” she complains. “My chest has fallen into my drawers.” Is there a drummer alive who would give these lines a rim shot?
The script is infantile at heart. Alcoholic beverages are “little drinkies,” and a penis is a “tootsy wootsy”; when Jacqueline says something in French, Charley replies, “You speak French? Oui oui, la pee pee.” Regarding a “Pakistani fella” that Moe met while using computers at Starbucks, Charley reports: “I checked out what he was writing on his screen while you were doing an hour and a half on your anal condition: 'Save me, dear Allah! Blow me up, kill me!’” On the enjoyment scale, Viagara falls somewhere between watching your grandparents masturbate and watching them go to the bathroom. As the play continues its arthritic shuffle toward a maudlin finale, you start to feel bad for the actors, all of whom have done enjoyable work in character roles on television. The harder they try—and boy, do they try—the more stubbornly flaccid the show remains.
Little Shubert Theatre. By Lou Cutell and Joao Machado. Dir. Don Crichton. With Cutell, Bernie Kopell, Teresa Ganzel. 1hr 30mins. No intermission.