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Wednesday, April 23, 2008
By Mark Franklin
A & E Reporter
Twenty-six years ago, the doors of the Sangamon Auditorium opened for the first time, and Hal Holbrook played to a sold-out crowd, returning for four more shows over the years. Saturday night, Holbrook played to yet another packed crowd, returning once again with his one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!
The premise behind the show is simple: Mark Twain tells his stories. Holbrook has a tremendous selection of Twain's works memorized, and he plays his way through ten or fifteen short selections in each act, never the same set twice. Dressed in Twain's trademark white suit, and wielding an impressive Southern drawl, Holbrook sparks laughter in his audience with each story.
The set for his show is simple and effective. A chair, a table loaded with books, and a podium, all set up so he can move freely as he needs to for each story. Entrances and exits are covered by a one-liner that could have come from Twain himself, from a self-aggrandizing introduction as Mr. Twain to a two sentence notice for the intermission that apologized for talking the audience to death and gave us a chance to “escape.”
There were times when, perhaps, the story—or the laugh lines—were not particularly suited to the audience, but Mr. Holbrook covered them very well. One line from Twain's works says, for example, that “All Republicans are insane...” which, if you know Sangamon County at all, did not engender any laughs whatsoever.
Even the few Democrats in the audience remained silent. On the other hand, the next sentence began with “All Democrats are insane...” which was greeted with a rousing roar of applause and cheers. The crux of the joke was that both parties are crazy and neither can see it in themselves, but the silence after the line about Republican insanity was the only place where he even came close to dropping character and breaking the Fourth Wall, and his seeming confusion was understandable given the fact that that line probably got laughs in most of his other shows.
Furthermore, I was impressed with his courage when, during the second act, he decided to recite The War Prayer, even after finding out that he had a Republican-dominated audience. I was less impressed by the audience members who decided that it was a humor piece and laughed.
Perhaps it's a sense of the sentimentality of bringing the man who opened the Auditorium back for his sixth show here, or perhaps it's the sentimentality of the sarcastic wit of Mark Twain, but Hal Holbrook's performance was fantastic, bringing laughter to everyone, young and old, Democrat or Republican, and reminding us that to be individual is the best way to be.
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