Fritz’s Wit and Wisdom, in Tight Focus

Everyone talks about the lack of weather, but Fritz Coleman is actually doing something about it.

Trading on his celebrity status as a TV weatherman in a region famed for its unvarying climate, Coleman displays a keen eye for this and other ironies in a return engagement of his solo performance piece “It’s Me! Dad!,” now at the Coronet Theatre.

A naturally sympathetic and engaging raconteur, Coleman employs the serviceable premise of a video time-capsule address to his young sons to weave one-liners and self-scrutiny into an assured autobiographical monologue under Richard Kline’s tightly focused direction.

The very ordinariness of his life fuels some of Coleman’s wittiest material--coming from a long line of innocuous, nondescript white Episcopalians, he claims to trace his lineage back to Talcum X. After a squeaky clean childhood that “makes the Brady Bunch look dysfunctional,” he dropped out of college and served in the Navy as a radio disc jockey, which led him to attempt stand-up comedy following his discharge.

Recalling his early career with good-natured self-deprecation--”No laughing, but very enthusiastic phlegm-clearing”--Coleman remains genuinely thankful for his good fortune but doesn’t gloss over the darker side of his psyche. One of the show’s high points is a rapid fire roll call of his petty male vanities, hilariously devastating in their pinpoint accuracy.

Despite reliance on a few too many glib high-concept similes (comparing his tranquil hometown to “Little House on the Prairie” on NyQuil, and so on), the jokes usually hit their mark. Coleman’s also poignant when he needs to be, attributing the failure of his marriage to the hope that “seeped out slowly until it was gone.” His descriptions of subsequent forays into middle-aged dating ring as much with anguished desperation as satirical venom.

In trying to pass on wisdom to his offspring, Coleman ends up with more uncertainties than answers. But more importantly, he’s met the objective spawned by the death of his own father with so much unsaid between them--making sure he’s made some peace with his sons in case he doesn’t outlive the blaming he knows will inevitably come before the forgiving.

BE THERE

“It’s Me! Dad!,” Coronet Theatre, 366 N. La Cienega Blvd. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Sept. 20. $22.50-$28. (213) 365-3500. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.