Two-person take on the Netflix series serves up a ton of laughs
At least half of the many laughs that come out of The Crown – Live! comes from watching two highly skilled and athletic comedians enjoying themselves so thoroughly on stage. Brendan Murphy and Elizabeth Arends are comic dynamite — a duo so in synch with each other that they can switch costumes in seconds to swap characters with one another.
The show is a pretty straightforward parody piece that both celebrates and lampoons the Netflix series, and while much of the material is low-hanging fruit (a wildly stuttering King George VI, a sloshed and over-sexed Princess Margaret), the zeal with which Murphy and Arends tackle it all is what gives it such impressive comic power.
Murphy’s initial character is Stanley Diamond, a talent agent in a small English town whose sole client is Beth (Arends). When they learn that Olivia Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth in seasons 3 and 4, will not return, the doofus agent and his ninny of a client race across the pond to hopefully convince Netflix execs to choose her as the new QE2. They explain away their appearance in Denver as a logical step in their quest, given the active theatre scene in town alongside Stanley’s bullshit assurance that there are most certainly some Netflix C-suiters in the audience.
There’s no fourth wall here, and similar to shows like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – Abridged, a lot of funny is teased out of the audience itself. It’s not long before Murphy has identified a guy in the front row as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and others near the stage are also assigned recurring and one-off roles (Murphy milks a lot of laughs out of a guy he appointed “royal phone operator.”)
While there’s a clear script outlining the many bits, the show provides for plenty of freelancing and improv. There’s also a good bit of commentary on the show itself — a sort of flying the plane while building it approach that effectively turns the audience into a collaborator. “Like this bit? OK, we’ll do more of it!”
So, what about the echidna in the room: If you’ve never seen the Netflix series, will you enjoy this show? That’s an emphatic “yes!” My wife and I watched one episode of The Crown and called it quits. But my daughter-in-law, who attended the show with me, has seen everyone one of them, and we both enjoyed The Crown – Live! a great deal.
Murphy and Arends are both phenomenal comic actors who’ve clearly performed this show together many times. It’s a speeding train wreck from start to finish with no comic rock unturned, no cultural cross-reference unnoted and no royal cows too sacred to lampoon — even as they acknowledge the queen’s recent death and move on.
I love this kind of comedy and had a smile on my face the whole time as we were treated to nothing short of an onslaught of funny bits. As the audience filed out to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” it was back out into our troubled world but with at least 90 minutes of comic relief fresh in mind. The Crown – Live! is an ideal show for the Garner Galleria’s cabaret setup, and the fact that you can sit and ha
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