STAGE REVIEW : ‘Phil’ Is Rife With Strife

Performer-humorist Orson Bean, stomping his foot for the union label, has created a musical-dramatic paean to the American labor movement that is alternately touching and hokey.

“Waiting for Phil” (as in Donahue) charts the efforts of working stiffs in a pizza parlor to win public support for their sit-down strike over driver protests against a 13-minute delivery policy. Bean’s zealous union warrior gives the young employees in Dino’s Pizza a lesson in the historic struggle to create decent working conditions, and the seven-member cast fills the Burbage Theatre with classic labor songs.

The highlight is Bean’s haunting story of the 1911 New York Triangle Shirt Factory fire in which 146 women died because management had locked the doors to keep the garment workers from going to the bathroom during working hours.

What’s missing is a topical edge. The show would be stronger if Bean would connect the Triangle Shirt Factory to horror stories today, such as the recent fire in a North Carolina poultry processing plant, where illegally locked doors again resulted in the deaths of workers.

The show’s heart is in the right place: Bean’s forlorn dirge for a movement’s fading light, notably among young people whose ideals are both TV-shallow and media-savvy. But the production’s problem is its narrative simplicity and lack of characterization. Director Louis Fantasia (who also designed the gritty set) does squeeze tension from the piece, with good blue-collar portraits coming from Michael Aaron, TasiaValenza) and Michael McCreight.