It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Live
Hirano was swiftly followed by two videos, a preview for a Christmas
DVD and a full episode from the new season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Highlight: Danny DeVito's
character (who joined the show in the second season) in skinny hipster
pants doing a spin and declaring, "What? I think they make me look
sexy." We can only hope that some of the boys in the audience saw
themselves in that scene and immediately went out to buy new pants this
morning.
The lights dipped to signify the beginning of the real show, and when they snapped back up, Charlie Day, who plays Sunny's
dim-witted and unhinged Charlie Kelly, was onstage. He kicked off the
show with a frantic, leg flailing song and dance. The reproduced episode
is an audience favorite, but also an obvious choice for a
stage show because it contains a full musical. "The Nightman Cometh" was written by Charlie as an ill-fated declaration of love to a waitress
with whom he is obsessed. Rather than being an effective love letter,
it becomes a meditation on the male characters' obsession with, and
nervous aversion to, sodomy, and Charlie's stunted maturity. All of
this translated easily to the stage, because the setting of the show
has never been the point. Like Seinfeld's apartment, Paddy's Pub is
just a convenient space in which the characters act out their
anti-social tendencies, lubricated with booze.
Lines from the
episode were faithfully reproduced and extra songs padded out the
musical portion, but that wasn't really what the night was about. Rabid
fans want nothing more than to be close to the object of their
adoration, and while musicians are readily available for viewing, the
same can't be said of TV stars. The audience was clearly happy to be in
the same room with The Gang, and the actors accommodated their enthusiasm by interacting
freely with the audience. When Charlie insisted that DeVito's Frank
Reynolds spit out his gum into the palm of his hand, he chucked it into
the crowd, followed by a tail of spit. When Kaitlin Olson's Sweet D
failed to deliver a line with lightening speed, the audience began
chanting it. "I know the line," she snapped. Such abuse was met with
glee. Rob McElhenney (who plays Mac), dressed as the "Night Man" in
black karate garb and eye paint, liberally pointed into the audience
like a lounge singer on crack and a ripple of excitement tracked his
gestures. At one point he smiled conspiratorially to stage left and
flashed a nipple. At the end of the show, the cast enthusiastically
high-fived everyone within high-fiving distance.
Part of
enjoying comedy is wanting, a little desperately, to be in on the joke.
And the live nature of It's Always Sunny granted the audience that right for a
short period of time. At the end of the episode, when Charlie sang a desperate
proposal to the waitress and she callously refused him, she turned to
the audience and said, "I don't know why you're all clapping. That
didn't make any sense." Delivered live, it's doubly funny. It's not
just absurdly cruel, it's a great inside joke.
Personal Bias: I spent much of the day before the show treating uninterested parties to my own rendition of It's Always Sunny's songs.
By the Way: Danny DeVito stole the show. Who knew that the actor from Twins would
one day be clomping around in a raggedy, green robe and prosthetic nose
singing about boys' holes (sorry, souls) and calling people "bitch."
Also, Kaitlin Olson is a really good singer.
