Among the dozens of categories at the 76th Emmy Awards, which will be broadcast tonight live on ABC, one is virtually a theater award. True, it’s virtually, not officially. Three of the nominations in “Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special” were for shows that were originally on a New York stage, one of which won a Tony Award.
And four of the five nominated in the category are stand-up comics who double (or moonlight?) as theater artists. (The fifth nomination is for the many writers of the 2024 Academy Awards broadcast.)
Update: Alex Edelman has won the Emmy.
Alex Edelman performed “Just For Us” Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane in 2021, then moved to Broadway for a two-month run last year, where Edelman won a Special Tony Award. It was filmed at Broadway’s Hudson Theater for an HBO Special currently on Max; the first few seconds show Edelman rushing from his dressing room, through backstage, to the stage to begin the Yeshiva-educated Edelman’s joke-filled true story of his attendance at a meeting of white supremacist antisemites in Queens. (My reviews of Just for Us Off-Broadway and on Broadway.)
Jacqueline Novak performed “Get On Your Knees” Off-Broadway, also at the Cherry Lane. in 2019. It moved to the larger Lortel, had a couple of encore runs. Netflix filmed her performance at Town Hall, showing her entering from the street, drinking a glass of water, then girding herself for her entrance to enthusiastic applause where she begins immediately her riff on oral sex. “I’m going to talk about the blow job quite a bit tonight, ‘to the point of tedium,’ said one early critic.” She does talk about other things. She’s an intellectual, she explains, so “everything below my chin is beneath me.”
Although Mike Birbiglia had debuted his previous solo show, “The New One” at the Cherry Lane, before it went on to Broadway, “Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & The Pool,” his fifth comic monologue went straight to Broadway for a two-month run in 2022. Netflix filmed the show at Broadway’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, beginning with an exterior shot of Lincoln Center, and time-lapse photography of the audience inside rapidly taking their seats. In front of a set that looks like a cross between a swimming pool and a medical graph, Birbiglia riffs on his lifelong aversion to exercise, and his history of serious health issues, which collide when his doctor orders him to go to the gym. It occurred to me the title recalls title of Hemingway’s novella, “The Old Man and the Sea,” and can be likewise interpreted as being about the struggle against death, except it’s funny.
That all three of these performers have played the Cherry Lane Theater, may help explain why the movie studio A24 recently bought that hundred-year-old Off Broadway theater.
John Early’s “Now More Than Ever” was put together from a one-night only performance at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, which was filmed for Max and became a combination stand-up, rock concert, and mock backstage documentary. Although best known for his TV roles (“Search Party”) Early was an early host of Showgasm at Ars Nova.
