Billy Meets Moscow : Crystal Plays the Pushkin Theatre in HBO Comedy Special

Billy Crystal couldn’t believe his ears. He was standing backstage at the Pushkin Theatre preparing to do stand-up comedy in front of a mixed audience of Soviets and foreign diplomats, and an impatient crowd was chanting his name.

“They lined up to see me and they yelled my name before the even met me,” he said the next day. While Crystal has been a household name in the United States since his 1977 network comedy debut in “Soap,” he is as unknown here as Soviet superstar Alla Pugachova is in the United States.

Four and a half months of preparation and worry about his Home Box Office special--”Billy Crystal: Midnight Train to Moscow”--had paid off at last in those few minutes. “It’s that feeling that you can reach people you never thought you would play before. They were moved by me, and they made me feel great.”

There was an added anxiety to playing before that audience this week. It contained members of Crystal’s family from the United States and from the Soviet Union. Crystal’s mother’s family originally comes from Moscow, and his father’s from the Soviet city Odessa. Parts of the special include film shot at a huge family reunion.

And there is another family connection: Crystal’s 16-year-old daughter, Jennifer, will play the role of Crystal’s grandmother as a young woman coming to America.

“I’ve been working on it for months,” said the theater student as she watched her father being transformed in a five-hour makeup ordeal into Sheila, the quintessential American tourist in Moscow.

Sheila is Crystal’s newest character, and she joins a long list, among them “Fernando,” the infamous continental Latin lounge lizard Crystal portrayed on “Saturday Night Live.” But more recently he hit pay dirt for a much more sympathetic character, that of Harry Burns in the movie “When Harry Met Sally . . .”

The characters of Sheila and her husband Leonard are more savvy than most American tourists here: They bribe their way into a Moscow restaurant with toilet paper, turn their video camera on Soviets standing in lines, and meet with Misha, a stereotypical Muscovite portrayed sensitively by Crystal during his stand-up routine at the Pushkin.

Dressed in an ill-fitting Moscow jacket and peaked cap and carrying the ubiquitous string bag, always at the ready in case one sees something to buy in the normally bare shops, Crystal’s Misha gave a sad, sentimental, humorous and biting commentary on Soviet and American ways of life. “I want to go to America to see these 24-hour-grocery stores,” he said sadly as he waited in the usual Soviet two-hour lineup. “And the special food you make just for dogs.”

How do you prepare to deliver stand-up comedy to a Soviet audience that has never seen an American comedian before? Is American comedy funny outside the United States?

“I was worried I would offend them,” Crystal said. “I had tried a small routine at Georgi Arbatov’s Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies when I first visited here last April and it went miserably. When I got sarcastic, they got offended.”

So Crystal went back and worked on stand-up that wouldn’t offend. “I wanted them to know I wanted to be here,” he said.

The opening minutes of his act were delivered solely in Russian. And they got Russian laughs. Crystal studied Russian for two months to get those laughs with the teacher who tutored Robin Williams for his role in the movie “Moscow on the Hudson.”

The audience warmed immediately. So much so that he persuaded them to do the first Soviet “wave,” and after his performance three Soviet soldiers thanked him for coming. “I think they were so happy to see someone who wanted to talk to them rather than just the usual American rock band,” he said later.

Walking the fine line of “hitting them softly” wasn’t easy. At the last minute before leaving the United States, Crystal decided to include Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in his show. And the leader did make an appearance--as a cutout.

“I don’t think a Russian comic would put the cutout of Gorbachev on stage,” Crystal said. But the audience loved it.

To make sure the Soviets didn’t feel put down, he used a lot of you-have-we-have humor--”You have the Moscow circus, we have Congress; you have the dancing bear in the circus, we have Dan Quayle; you have Baryshnikov, we have Baryshnikov.”

But at the last moment he decided to cut out a skit based on the poison gassing of demonstrators in Tbilisi in April. His skit carried it one step further, making the gas a normal Soviet punishment. A father tells his son: “Don’t talk to your mother like that. You’re going to talk to your mother like that I’m going to have to give you the nerve gas. Here see, I just did the dog.”

“I was worried it would turn into a ‘Oh yeah, well what about Kent State?’ kind of thing,” Crystal said.

The HBO special, which will air Oct. 28, is enormous in conception and in costs. Michael Fuchs, chairman and chief executive officer of HBO, said the production will run into seven figures to produce.

“But this is a bit of history,” he said, justifying it as he waited for Crystal to start his stand-up routine, and ultimately to find out if Soviets think he is funny. “The voice of comedy is as socially relevant as any voice,” he said. “And Billy is not your typical comedian. He’s capable of presenting a point of view with intelligence and relevance.”

That voice was being helped to make its point by a crew of 60, including a food truck that was transported by ferry and overland from London. The crew would not have had the time in its nonstop production schedule to wait for food in the notoriously slow Soviet restaurants. In fact, one of Crystal’s best digs at Moscow is at its restaurants: “I finally discovered what the five-year plan is--it’s the wait for service in a restaurant.”

In the short time he has spent here, Crystal has become incredibly attuned to what the Soviets are going through.

“When you come here you feel the frustration: Why does it have to be this way? There’s no reason,” he said. Contemplating the grayness of life and the despair, he announced: “Ted Turner should buy this country and colorize it.”

In the end, does he have any advice for Gorbachev? “Think Armani,” he joked. And then soberly added: “I think he has to keep moving the way he’s moving. I admire him a great deal.”