REVIEW: Rosie is Red and Everybody is Blue
4/29-5/18 @ TheREP, Albany
“It’s a loving portrait of a family who can’t stay out of each other’s business, for better or worse.”
Rosie is Red and Everybody is Blue is a laugh-out-loud sitcom from the 70s that has somehow wound up on theREP’s stage. I laughed heartily (more so in the first act), marveled at the actors, and felt deeply ambivalent about much of the material they were asked to play.
Rosie (Inga Ballard) comes home from driving her school bus, only to find her 28-year-old son, Chris, (charismatic Chris Blunt) cowering under a blanket and wallowing in self-pity from his most recent break up. Also in the house is Lenny (deadpan and delightful Montae Russell) who is Rosie’s late husband’s brother. Her late husband, Ray, is present as well in a box of ashes on the top of the bookcase, which becomes the fifth character in the show.
Rosie would like to encourage everyone to move out of her house, get on with their lives and leave her to recover from her loss. It’s a loving portrait of a family who can’t stay out of each other’s business, for better or worse. Ballard, as directed by Reginald L. Douglas, is a powerhouse. So strong that her silent takes to the audience can be read clearly and provoke laughs as strong (or stronger) than the punchlines.
The play is set in Albany, although besides a stray reference to Osborne Road, I’m not sure what I missed that would have told me that. The playwright, John Spellos, is a Christian Brothers Academy grad who won the 2023 Next Act Summit for Rosie. I don’t know why this white playwright is writing this Black family story except for his comfort with the Black sitcoms that are referenced in the production.
In promotional materials for the play, ads suggest: “If you like this…”–with examples of sitcoms including Modern Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times– “you will like this” (Rosie). I don’t respond well to theatres touting television as the calling card to get you into the theatre… but the ads aren’t wrong. Besides the numerous 70s and 80s TV theme songs played in the pre-show, the set by Alexander Woodward has the fake wood paneling from my family room and Cosby sweaters show up in Karen Perry’s costume plot.
The difference between a sitcom and a stage comedy should be clear; one is a piece of furniture in your house, the other is a social commitment to gather with others in a shared space for an experience. As an art form, sitcoms without greater social themes or persuasive storylines rely on constant laughs. The best will hide as best they can from the reliance on laughs.
Rosie traffics in far too many cheap laughs for me. Making fun of characters names which the playwright has invented such as Chris’s new romantic interest Vanessa Dixon (the enchanting Maya Jackson). The kids teased her mercilessly on the school bus because she has the initials VD and her last name includes the word “dick”.
The toilet humor is extensive as Lenny prefers to urinate with the seat down and the bathroom door open, 10 feet away from his sister-in-law sleeping on the couch. Worse, Rosie’s world view has her philosophizing that everybody has to eat shit in this life and she expounds on that with vivid descriptions of the differences of the fecal matter we choose. This analogy is repeated more than once. Mangia.
Rosie is Red and Everybody is Blue plays through 5/18 at theREP (251 North Pearl St, 12207). Tickets: attherep.org
