“All In: Comedy about Love,” opening on Broadway tonight, is not based on Simon Rich’s humorous stories; it is a selection of those stories, read aloud from hand-held binders by a rotating cast of four celebrities sitting on chairs. The story-reading is interspersed with songs from the album “69 Love Songs” composed by Stephin Merritt, which are performed by Abigail and Shaun Bengson and their band.

This set-up hasn’t sat well with posters to various chat rooms, who have complained about the high ticket prices and the misleading marketing, which implied it was a play rather than a reading. (One long Reddit thread debated whether it’s a “scam.”) Reviews tonight from invited critics are also largely mixed to negative so far:

Elizabeth Vincentelli, NY Times: “a slight affair that’s as easy to forget as it is to watch”
Sara Holdren, Vulture/NY Mag: ..”for All In to qualify as a comedy about love, it would actually have to be a play. Instead, it’s an expensive staged reading”
Johnny Oleksinski, NY Post: “Ticket-buyers are being charged as much as $800 a pop some weeks for what is little more than a sedate staged reading of New Yorker cartoon captions uttered by celebrities.”
One of the few completely positive reviews is from Adam Feldman, TimeOut New York: “…although the stories tend to resolve on awww-inspiring notes, All In is first and foremost funny…”

Rich’s stories have all been published previously, some in the New Yorker magazine, most in collections of his humor pieces; most of these are also audiobooks – Man Seeking Woman: And Other Love Stories(2013) Spoiled Brats (2014) Hits and Misses (2018) New Teeth (2021), Glory Days (2024.)  The latest one is narrated by John Mulaney, who will be one of the quartet of “All In” story-readers through January 12. Most of the others are read by Rich himself,  who doesn’t consider himself a performer but has been in the public eye for some fifteen year. For four years in his early twenties, he was a staff writer on “Saturday Night Live,” which was at about the same time he began writing for the New Yorker, and getting book contracts from Random House.  Rich has read his stories aloud on various talk shows, which are available online. 

All of which means you can read and even hear Rich’s stories without going to “All In.”

I say this because I didn’t go to “All In.”  Although I’ve been invited as a critic to review every other show on Broadway this season, I was not invited to review “All In.” You would think Simon Rich, at least, might be sympathetic to reviewers; he’s the son of a notorious one, Frank Rich. But I doubt he was the person making the decision.

Tickets to “All In” have an official top ticket price of $475*. Now, it’s not as if I’ve never spent that kind of money before – my rent is higher than that, and some medical care has cost almost as much. But I worried that spending so much to watch the sort of event that occurs regularly but FAR more cheaply at  Symphony Space and the 92^nd Street Y might have unfairly biased me against the content.

Still, I didn’t need to be completely shut out. I was able to read (and listen to) some of the stories on my own that are included during the 90 minutes of “All In.” For the record, I found them funny. Rich’s humor feels reminiscent of early Woody Allen stories, with abrupt dips into absurdist one-liners, but often resolve with a gentle pathos that reminded me of O.Henry. Here are five of them:

Dog Missed Connections May 2014, from his collection “The Last Girlfriend on Earth,” is a series of personal ads taken out by canines. In the first one, headlined “M/4/W East River Dog Run,” a dog recalls how they met at the dog run “and we sort of had sex for a couple of seconds. You shook me off, though, and ran away…We obviously have chemistry…I’ll be back at the dog run tomorrow morning.”

Here Rich is reading the story on a show called Running Late

In New Client, 2018, from his book “Hit and Misses,” Alvy is a hack talent agent who only stayed in the business to take care of his ill wife. Death comes to take him, and Alvy tries to stave off the inevitable by flattering the Grim Reaper into becoming a client.  What’s funniest about this to me is that Death is like any adult remembering the high school play he was in.

Here is an audio of Rich reading the story in 2018.

In History Report Aug 2022, Simon’s great-grandson interviews him for a school assignment in a future in which climate change long ago forced human beings to leave Earth, and Great-Grandfather Simon was one of the few adult males who escaped, part of a generation guilty of crimes against humanity for having ignored climate crisis. (“I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening, and he said yes, of course. I asked him how, and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different-colored boxes. I asked my mom what he was talking about, and she explained that when people become as old as my Great-Grandfather their brains start to break down and it is almost like they turn back into babies.”)

But most of the story focuses on the kid’s recounting of Simon’s account of how he met his wife, and the supremely odd dating rituals involved. “Sometimes, in those days, when someone agreed to go out on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing, and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face, as if their actual, living, breathing face was their social-media profile.”

An audio of Rich reading the story on This American Life

In Learning the Ropes Feb 2020, Black Bones and his first mate Rotten Pete the Scoundrel do everything pirates are supposed to do, saying “Arrr” a lot and  “charting a bloody course across the briny blue, looting every schooner fool enough to drift into our ken,” as Black Bones puts it. They look like pirates too, with eye patches, peglegs, and parrots. But when they take over a ship, they discover a stowaway – a little girl, and they start co-parenting, which causes a rift in their relationship indistinguishable from a marriage on the brink : “..he started listing all of the things that I be doing wrong, how me biscuits be giving her tummy aches, and me cursing be setting a bad example, and me stories about me graphic murders be making her traumatized-like…”

The longest story is probably The Big Nap July 2021, from New Teeth.

Here is how it begins:

“The detective woke up just after dawn. It was a typical morning. His knees were scraped and bruised, his clothes were damp and soiled, and his teeth felt like someone had socked him in the jaw. He reached for the bottle he kept under his pillow and took a sloppy swig. The taste was foul, but it did the trick. Now he could sit up and think. Now he could start to figure out how to somehow face another goddam day.

“He stared at his reflection in the mirror. He wasn’t getting any younger. His eyes were red and bleary. His scalp was dry and itchy. He was two years old, and soon he would be three. Unless he stayed two. He wasn’t sure if you stayed the age you were or if that changed.”

A spoof of Dashiell Hammett. His client turns out to be his little sister, who wants him to find Moomoo, her unicorn.

Comparing the reaction of people who actually attended “All In” to my more pleasurable reaction to having read some of the stories, and listened to Simon Rich read them aloud, I wonder whether this is an example of how Broadway has lost its way. In a different, less cynical era, ticket prices would have been lower, and the producers would not feel it necessary to cast celebrities to lure in an audience. Maybe Simon Rich could have read his own stories.

“All In: Comedy about Love” is at the Hudson Theater through February 16

John Mulaney (December 11 – January 12)
Fred Armisen (December 11 – January 12)
Renée Elise Goldsberry (December 11 – 29)
Richard Kind (December 11 – January 12)
Chloe Fineman (December 30 – January 12)
Lin-Manuel Miranda (January 14 – February 16)
Aidy Bryant (January 14 – February 2)
Andrew Rannells (January 14 – 26)
Nick Kroll (January 14 – February 2)
Jimmy Fallon (January 28 – February 2)
David Cross (February 4 – 9)
Annaleigh Ashford (February 4 – 16)
Tim Meadows (February 4 – 16)
Hank Azaria (February 11 – 16)

*There is a $45 lottery for “All In” on TodayTix. I couldn’t find any regular tickets below $188.