THEATER REVIEW : ‘Breaking Legs’ a Pleasant Shades-of-Sitcom Romp

If playwrights dream of backers, then why can’t prosperous gangsters dream of opening nights? They do in “Breaking Legs,” the mobster-impresario comedy by Tom Dulack now at the Pasadena Playhouse.

A cousin to “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Breaking Legs” came first, having its premiere at the Old Globe in 1989. Here’s the situation: Buoyed by his play’s success in Belgium, an English professor (James DeMarse) decides to try the big time: Off Off Broadway. He finds backers in Lou, Tino and Mike, three guys with pinkie rings and neck chains, guys who love pasta fagioli and who solemnly cross themselves whenever someone mentions a deceased person whose sudden demise they seem to know an awful lot about.

This is the kind of setup designed to produce comedy in culture clash. Witness the professor’s discomfort when the mobsters conduct a last interview with Frankie Salvucci (Eddie Zammit), a nervous debtor who smokes two cigarettes at once while consuming a double Scotch and tapping his foot maniacally.

Watch the blank expressions when the professor begins a sentence with, “Remember what Goethe said. . . .” Hear the inevitable moment when Mike asks the playwright to cast his daughter’s niece, a depressed fat girl who plays the accordion.

The play provides great parts for three fabulous big lugs, here handled faultlessly by actors with faces Preston Sturges would have loved.

Stephen Mendillo plays Lou, a restaurant owner who serves up a steady flow of fried calamari and indigestion for his friends. Charles Lucia is the capo Mike, who laughs like a donkey with asthma. The wonderful J.J. Johnston barely has to say a word as Tino, the quiet aide-de-camp. He watches the others with childlike eyes that seem to be following slow-moving whales on a radar screen, until he picks up something he needs to respond to.

The professor gets lured into their underworld by a former student, Angie, played with spirit by Marianne Ferrari. Angie is Lou’s shapely legged daughter, a barracuda in a miniskirt, who has designs of her own on the handsome playwright.

“Breaking Legs” ran Off Broadway for more than a year. It is a broad popular comedy of the type that Muriel Resnik and Murray Schisgal used to supply for Broadway audiences before sitcoms perfected the job of feeding the country its diet of pleasant no-brainers at the end of a long day. The playwright directs a smooth and straightforward production.

“Breaking Legs” delivers the minimal message: We--teachers or gangsters all--are not that far apart. No one will come for more of a message than that and no one will leave with one. The audience will exit sitcom-fulfilled, and with a distinct urge for veal and peppers.

* “Breaking Legs,” The Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 5 and 9 p.m., Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends April 23. $33.50. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours.

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James DeMarse: Terence O’Keefe Stephen Mendillo: Lou Graziano Marianne Ferrari: Angie Graziano Richard Zavaglia: Mike Francisco J.J. Johnston: Tino De Felice Eddie Zammit: Frankie Salvucci A Pasadena Playhouse production. Written and directed by Tom Dulack. Sets by Gary Wissmann. Lights by Kevin Mahan. Costumes by Dawna Oak. Production stage manager Elsbeth M. Collins.