![]() Zagat and Gourmet are out Chopped and Bon Appétit are in. She has dropped the more obvious ethnic punch lines - a shady Arab and a shy Japanese wife - though she’s retained a few Jewish harridans, a sacré bleu! Frenchman, a hick, a Mafioso, and a South Asian. Becky Mode, who developed the characters with Mark Setlock, the play’s original star, has revised her script to reflect up-to-the-minute trends in the restaurant and celebrity business - and in the theater. Indeed, one of the meta-charms of Fully Committed is to see how such things have changed in 17 years, and how they haven’t. Now as then, though, the star’s dirty work is done by an assistant named Bryce, a full throwback to screaming gay stereotypes of yore. When Fully Committed premiered at the Vineyard in 1999, eventually moving to the Cherry Lane for a 675-performance run, the vegan princess wasn’t a fictionalized Paltrow but a fictionalized Naomi Campbell. Needless to say, this being a restaurant, none of the demands is a true emergency, no matter how much the callers bully and scream - unless accommodating Gwyneth Paltrow with an all-vegan tasting menu for 15, with flattering light bulbs and no women servers, counts as an emergency. But as the outside lines, the in-house intercoms, and his own cellphone start ringing, Ferguson takes on the vocal and gestural lives of all the callers: would-be guests, terrified assistants his agent, friends, frenemies, and family the arrogant chef, the tantrum-y maître d’, and various others, all exploding with ASAP demands. Initially he’s just Sam Callahan, a struggling actor sullenly working a pre-Christmas shift taking reservations at a superhot Manhattan restaurant. I don’t know if it qualifies as part of Broadway’s ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays, by my count, an astonishing 34 roles, together constituting a rainbow of assholes. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, in Fully Committed.
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