On a nondescript morning a few weeks before Christmas, struggling actor Sam Callaghan (Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson) descends into the bowels of a trendy restaurant to carry out his day job and manage the reservation line.
With its dusty cans of tomatoes, clunky file cabinets and clanging pipes, this basement isn’t exactly the Inferno, but you can see by the set of his shoulders and the droop of his mouth that Sam abandons all hope as soon as he enters. His perdition only worsens when he learns that the reservation manager is missing, Heston Blumenthal has arrived unexpectedly, the staff meal has already been eaten and a sick customer has fouled the men’s room in a most appalling manner. Timorous Sam must deal with all of these crises while answering the constantly ringing phones (the three dozen callers and restaurant staff are also voiced by Ferguson).
Fully Committed first debuted in New York in 1999, starring Mark Setlock, an actor who had worked with playwright Becky Mode to create the characters. The play has the feel of a script built through improvisation, with a lot of attention given to quick gags and less to story structure. The show’s winning – if perilously slight – arc shows diffident Sam finally manning up as he borrows a trick or two from those manipulative and self-seeking voices on the other end of the line.
Foodie culture has only grown more prominent in the intervening years and Mode has updated the script somewhat. Digs once targeted at Naomi Campbell are now meant for Gwyneth Paltrow and the current menu parodies the trend toward high-end foraging favorites, as seen in a special of “crispy deer lichen atop a slowly deflating scent-filled pillow, dusted with edible dirt”. (Of course, if Mode really wanted to contemporise the action, she might have reset in the beleaguered Hamilton box office.)
Some of the jokes could be sharper and even as the script skewers the horrifying patrons, it is often strangely polite. (The vulgar assertions of the loutish chef are actually pretty welcome.) With its sole actor and circumscribed world, Fully Committed seems an odd choice for Broadway. But Ferguson is an actor of such irrepressible amiability. Who would have denied him a great stage? One feels a pom-pom shaking enthusiasm for his Sam from the play’s first moments, particularly as Ferguson can’t help but infuse Sam’s hangdog apologies with an air of ungovernable goodness.
Under Jason Moore’s direction, a few of the actorly shifts could occur more quickly and not all the personae have a gestural specificity to match the vocal one. But moving back and forth among 40 distinct characters still represents a tour de force, which Ferguson wears lightly, even humbly, though with obvious enjoyment. He’s having his artisanal, locally sourced, pollen-topped cake and eating it, too.
