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In rehearsal, Sharon Pfeiffer plays Regina and Alex Alonso is Frank in From Brooklyn to Boca at The Studio at Mizner Park in Boca Raton. Photo by Boris Balaban
By Jan Sjostrom
From Brooklyn to Boca covers a lot of territory, geographically speaking. Not so much when it comes to the heavy-footed comedy making its world premiere at The Studio at Mizner Park in Boca Raton.
The play is about an Italian Catholic mob family who are relocated from Brooklyn to Boca Raton under the federal witness protection program.
Theater-goers familiar with the title locales are the most likely to enjoy it.
According to its promotional material, From Brooklyn to Boca is about “family, love, relationships and acceptance.”
The plot is based loosely on the life of star Sharon Pfeiffer, a Boca Raton resident who co-wrote the script with Deni Sher of Weston. Neither has written a play before, and it shows.
Director Sharee Pemberton, who is also one of the show’s producers, steers a seemingly endless freight train of clunky, staccato scenes.
There’s a thread of a good story here as Regina and Frank Rifiuto and their 12-year-old son, Carmine, stumble through their transformation into a model Jewish family in Boca Raton while being pursued by the mobsters Frank has promised to rat on.
But the show fails to ring true, a feat that’s at the heart of a successful comedy. The tale is buried under a load of corny jokes, stock characters, stilted acting and about an hour’s worth of extraneous material.
The show is narrated by Regina, played by Pfeiffer, who periodically steps out of the story to set the scene and deliver comic asides.
Pfeiffer has a gift for physical comedy, which she uses to amp up her lines. But with a lumbering script and her unreliable comic timing, she rarely gets the room-filling laughs the lines aspire to.
Some of her best moments come as Regina misinterprets staples of Jewish life – describing a neighbor’s offer to teach her mahjong as learning to play cards in Jewish – or attempts to overlay Catholic practices, such as confession, on her new religion.
As Regina’s junior mobster husband, Frank, Alex Alonso struggles to wring laughs from malapropisms such as “guilt by assassination” rather than association and Frank’s thick-as-a-brick intellect.
Thumping repetitions of thin comic devices recur with numbing regularity. The overuse of the expression “elephant in the room,” would be enough to compel any pachyderm who happened to be in the room to wear ear plugs.
Stock characters, including a cynical government agent, a flamboyant drag queen, and a nosy neighbor, abound. The mobsters would have been at home in the movie Home Alone.
With a cast of 16, the show has an oversupply of characters. The strongest portrayals include Bob Sharkey, as the tainted priest Father O’Neill, Michael Blocksberg as the affable though baffled Rabbi Rabinowitz, and Cameron Holder as the diva Dani, a worker in the shop where Regina and Frank are installed as owners. In addition to playing other roles, Leslie Kandel excels as the nosy neighbor Rhonda and Nina Poulos lights up the stage as the lawyer with the lisp, Sarah Spiegelberg.
Sets are rudimentary. A rolling apparatus bears backdrops such as the ocean view outside of Regina’s and Frank’s Florida condo and a monitor at the side of the stage displays scenes of Brooklyn and Boca and other images. Scenes are linked by disco and other vintage popular music. Pfeiffer has the best wardrobe, decked out in form-fitting outfits and a pair of high-heel pink boots, which she wears throughout the first act.
The show falls far short of its lofty aims. But that’s not to say there aren’t a few gems that are almost worth waiting for.
From Brooklyn to Boca is Walk the Walk Productions’ first live theater show. The company plans to stage it in June at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center and is looking at other venues, Sher said.
From Brooklyn to Boca runs through Jan. 19 at 201 Plaza Real in Boca Raton. Performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets start at $45 and are available at www.ticketmaster.com/from-brooklyn-to-boca-tickets/artist/3261969.
