Theatre in Review: Not Ready for Prime Time (The Newman Mills Theater at The Robert W. Wilson MCC) There are only two things wrong with Not Ready for Prime Time, a comic drama about the birth of Saturday Night Live: It isn't very dramatic and isn't very funny. Indeed, a situation that should be rife with tension and anarchic humor is, dismayingly, rendered in plodding terms. The first act covers how producer Lorne Michaels, with the thinnest of resumes, is handed the 11:30pm-1am slot on NBC's Saturday night schedule, previously taken up with highlights from Johnny Carson's shows of the week. Michaels rounds up a motley crew of oddballs from the Second City and the Toronto improv and theatre scene, turning them loose in Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center, where they quickly remake the face of television comedy. It must have been the most relentless pressure cooker, grinding out a weekly ninety-minute variety show, with an untried cast exploiting edgy, often bizarre ideas, working under the noses of an executive cadre suspicious of the entire enterprise. Add the fact that nearly everyone involved was, shall we say, highly strung (even when sober), the situation should set off bountiful comic sparks. But Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers' script is woefully lacking in the beat-the-clock stress that must have driven Michaels and his army of rebels. But the writers settle for a series of disconnected plot points derived from the show's much-documented history: Chevy Chase's egomania, lording his breakout stardom over his colleagues; John Belushi's impulse-driven antics, combined with drug and alcohol abuse; Dan Aykroyd sweet-talking and two-timing Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner; Newman pining for her California home and discreetly shooting smack; Radner's food issues, Garrett Morris being sidelined because of his race. Everything is name-checked, yet nothing coheres. It's a chronicle, not a drama. Even more striking is how laughs are so thin on the ground. Each act opens with a sketch, one about a sexual threesome and another set in an insane asylum, each of which falls flat. (An attempt at stylizing Radner's cancer diagnosis in a sketch-comedy context is jarringly out of place.) The script is littered with half-hearted jokes. Michaels tells Chase, "Meet me at Katz's deli at one tomorrow for breakfast." "Perfect," Chase replies. "I have a dinner meeting there in the morning." NBC executive Dick Ebersol asks Michael, "Could we just make the show less irreverent?" "We'll start brewing the coffee with holy water," Michael snaps. Asked if he wants a drag on a Colombian joint, Belushi asks, "Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls?" If SNL had relied on lines like that, Johnny Carson would have been back on Saturday nights faster than you could say Carnac the Magnificent. Tasked with playing some of the most indelible TV personalities of the '70s, many of them still well-known today, the cast is put at a terrible disadvantage. Ryan Crout, Kristian Lugo, and Woodrow Proctor struggle to make Belushi, Aykroyd, and Chase anything more than grating, loutish adolescents, although Proctor at least has a nice way with Chase's pratfall gags. (We hear about Belushi's wild-man behavior, but Crout's characterization is surprisingly lacking in volatility.) Nate Janis has similar difficulties as both Ebersol and Bill Murray, hired to replace Chase and equipped with a good-sized chip on his shoulder. Rather better are Taylor Richardson and Evan Rubin as Newman and Radner, both frustrated by the show's prevalent locker-room humor; Rubin credibly imitates Radner doing Roseanne Roseannadanna and Baba Wawa. (Tommy Kurzman's wig designs make a big contribution here.) Jared Grimes is solid as Morris, too often sidelined because of his race. Caitlin Houlihan is especially appealing as Jane Curtin, the troupe's cheerleader and voice of reason, the only one whose personal life isn't a trainwreck. Michaels, the show's driving, yet famously withholding, force, is given a low-energy rendering by Ian Bouillion. If the director, Conor Bagley, can't do much with the sluggish script, he has a fine design team. The set, by Justin and Christopher Swader, is an imaginative rendering of Eugene Lee's original SNL design, amusingly cluttered with clocks, beer ads, stoplights, flashing applause signs, and an enormous staircase; the skylight over the stage is a nice touch. Mextly Couzin's lighting expertly takes us in and out of the action -- the script is overloaded with moments of direct audience address -- and creates plausible rehearsal and in-performance looks. Sarita P. Fellows' costumes capture the period's casual styles; she knows how out-of-work actors dressed back then. Liam Bellman-Sharpe's sound design efficiently supports the onstage band, playing a list of the era's hits. There are occasional moments of insight: Aykroyd and Newman, fooling around in her apartment, accidentally inventing The Coneheads; a funny sketch, cut by NBC management, featuring Curtain, Newman, and Radner kvelling over the benefits of a male blow-up sex doll; and other instances of cast members cooking up bits on the spot, if only to amuse themselves. The authors are sometimes coldly realistic about show business realities, for example, Aykroyd, with an eye on feature films, advising Newman to get a good agent pronto, or Morris, excited about working with guest host Richard Pryor, being told that the star won't share the stage with him. But, despite attempts at working up Chase's early defection to feature films and Michaels' brief exile from the series, Not Ready for Prime Time never takes off as drama, nor does it bring to life what made Saturday Night Live such a sensation. (The show's early seasons coincided with my college days; I attended many a party that would grind to a halt for a viewing of Weekend Update or Belushi's latest samurai caper; at breakfast the next morning, we'd go over each sketch, reliving our favorite bits.) The show's history has been extensively chronicled in books, magazine articles, documentaries, and a recent feature film. This addition to the corpus feels unnecessary. --David Barbour 
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