What I liked
- Jack Zullo: I think his Belushi was clearly very well developed and WITHOUT QUESTION well researched. He knew so much about Belushi’s life and career and, I think, could have performed as him for hours without anyone else on stage. His Cocker replication was also spot-on.
- The Story: Learning more about Belushi’s early days was fascinating. I certainly wasn’t clear on how he got from his beginnings to SNL.
- The Multimedia: Three Clubs is a tough space to use multimedia in, so I appreciate that they were attempting to use it to help explain the story.
- The Live Band: The music was great, throughout.
What I didn't like
- Lack of Focus: I originally started to put in this section several different categories (too many characters, the actors didn’t seem to match the characters, it was hard to tell who was who, the scenes seemed unclear at times) and then I realized that all of these equate into one overall, larger issue for me. The show, in its current form, seems to have a lack of focus. There’s SO MUCH information going on—so much data about Belushi’s life that you’re drawing from—that it almost seems like you’re not currently clear which pieces to use and which to skip. And so it’s ALL going into the show. And that’s why it feels like there are too many characters, too many scenes, too much happening that doesn’t complete, etc. I think this show has some real, solid, amazing potential—but I think some editing down to determine a stronger focus could do wonders for getting to that potential.
- Structure: If you’re going to begin with what appears to be Belushi dead…it seems weird not to go all the way through his life and end there. Instead, we seem to end at the beginning of the Blues Brothers. Perhaps it’s just because there’s again so much data that you can’t GET to the end without it being too long a show. But I know that I was sort of expecting to see his whole life because of where we started so was surprised at where we ended.
My overall impression
John Belushi was chaos incarnate. So it sort of feels appropriate that a play about his early career should also feel like chaos incarnate. The question however, is whether that chaos is happening purely ONSTAGE or also behind-the-scenes. And while I really, REALLY liked Jack Zullo AS john Belushi himself, I wasn’t entirely sure about where the chaos was coming from in the rest of the current version of this production.
It’s a giant cast of actors who are playing comedians I know—but I can’t recognize them from the actors’ performances or costumes or mannerisms. There are lots of scenes that are apparently replications of early Second City and other comic sketches—but they seem somehow unrehearsed (which seems strange, given that the original sketches are decades old). There is an opening scene that feel like it should be a bookend to the show—but the show ends nowhere near where the other bookend would be.
And yet, there is an enormous amount of energy on the stage. The actors are clearly invested in what they’re doing. There are scenes that have been shot previously and are being cut into the play. It makes me REALLY want to see the version of this play where the chaos is entirely IN the show and where the production has been tightened, shaped and molded into a fully functioning piece. It makes me want to see the final vision that I can sense is lurking just behind the chaos that was swarming around me during the performance I saw.
Then again, that was how I often felt when I was watching Belushi, too. So perhaps this is the perfect production about John Belushi one could ever make.
