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TORONTO - What's the line between laughter and tears? In Billy Crystal's hilarious and remarkable one-man show 700 Sundays at the Canon Theatre, that line is 15 minutes long and it's called intermission.
By acts respectively joyous and sad, 700 Sundays is Crystal's arc of realizing his mortality in three dense hours of jokes, reminiscences, solo sketches and character comedy. It's a busy oral mural of a family distinguished by "maniacs, lunatics and gas" that, by the end, most listeners are convinced could be their own.
That this Broadway baby is as kosher as a set by Alan King or Jackie Mason isn't a surprise. Crystal is in his element dissecting Yiddish as "German mixed with phlegm" and painting portraits of yenta aunts who shriek lines like "Get the car, Leonard!"
But it's the tale of another celebrity, his father Jack -- whom the New York Times eulogized as the "Branch Rickey of jazz" -- that is the meat of 700 Sundays and makes the first act in particular so exhilarating and hilarious. The title refers to the amount of time the younger Crystal spent with his dad, almost all of them on the day of the week he reserved for his boys, before he died of a heart attack when Billy was just 15.
And what a lot of Sundays it was, going to Yankee games (in Louis Armstrong's seats) to watch Mickey Mantle hit a record homer, driving in the family's "grey on grey Plymouth" and hitting the beach/amusement park near their Long Island home.
But it's the "work" dad brought home that really makes 700 Sundays come alive. Crystal's dad and uncle Milt ran a famed jazz record store, Commodore Records, which spun off a colour-barrier-breaking independent label. Its first artist, the guitarist Eddie Condon, was followed by a stream of jazz greats including Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday -- all of whom ended up at the Crystal's house, where they ate and drank bourbon and called little Billy "Face" because of his ability to mimic them (fans of Crystal will recognize the germ of his jazzbo impressions from Saturday Night Live).
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It's a great mix of black and Jewish cultures, as Crystal tells of his grandmother asking the gravel-voiced Satchmo "Louis, have you tried coughing it up?"
But to my mind, the story most worth bragging about is having Holliday take him to his first movie -- Shane, wherein she leaned into his ear as the young Brandon de Wilde yelled for Shane to "Come back!" and said "Y'know, he ain't never comin' back!"
Prophetic words indeed, as the free-spirited hilarity of the first act makes way for a second that is entirely devoted to loss. The record store folds after a Sam Goody's opens up across the street, he loves in vain, his father dies, and Crystal describes a life spent carrying "a boulder" of grief everywhere he goes. That same boulder reappears on a wide scale as his story touches on the Kennedy assassination and 9-11 (complete with pointing shots at Dubya, of whom Crystal is no fan).
Which is not to say that the second act of 700 Sundays contains no laughs. But they lean toward nervous-relief one-liners, as when he describes the shiva for his father, saying "Jews bury quickly. I had an uncle who was a narcoleptic. He'd nod off and you'd hear digging."
Crystal shares his pal Robin Williams penchant for wallpapering a show with scattershot one-liners. But the good ship 700 Sundays continues on course to its mordant but philosophic conclusion, marked by a fantasy sequence in which Crystal barges into God's office to speak his mind.
It's an exhausting trip -- one he'll be doing here for the next 10 days -- but one we're glad we shared.