PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!: V-Day on Bway

By Harry Haun
29 Sep 2006

From Top: Jay Johnson; Producers Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley; Celeste Holm; Joel Grey and Cindy Adams
From Top: Jay Johnson; Producers Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley; Celeste Holm; Joel Grey and Cindy Adams
Photo by Aubrey Reuben

In olden times, it was a matter of some prestige to have one’s name above the title, but this season has been an unbroken line of shows with names in the title: Jay Johnson: The Two and Only! opened Sept. 28, following Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me and Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway. All three pretend to be one-man shows, but only the new arrival truly qualifies—and even it’s more.

Johnson waxes the woodwork, which is to say he’s a ventriloquist, if we may use the V-word so early in the write-up. Yes, he talks to—the politically correct word, he says, is “wooden Americans,” but his show has considerably more depth, breath, height and heart than that. Even his “two”-of-the-moment varies in the extreme—from an unruly handful of a chimp named Darwin to an unkempt vulture to a talking tennis ball to a critter drawn from scratch to his best-known creation: the boorishly abrasive Bob from TV’s “Soap.”

Gluing the evening together are biographical tidbits, some quite poignant, about what turns a towhead from Abernathy, TX into this line of play—plus The History of Ventriloquism through the years, funny parts emphasized. A surprising, entertaining mix!

Wicked’s original Wizard of Oz, the Tony- and Oscar-winning Joel Grey, checked out Johnson’s vocal gymnastics on opening night—tantamount to occult royalty—and the other Oscar-winner on hand, Celeste Holm, deemed the show “fascinating and spellbinding.”

Like Johnson, Junior’s rang up a Broadway debut, hosting the opening-night party. The famous Brooklyn eatery with the legendary strawberry cheesecake recently opened up a Broadway branch, off Shubert Alley on West 45th, replacing Bolzano’s (which ran slightly longer than the one and only Broadway show it opened: The Blonde in the Thunderbird).

Pigs-in-the-banket kept comin’ before the serious potato salad, ribs and burgers were brought out. Johnson lorded over the festivities like the affable, unflappable host of a Texas barbecue, glad-handing like a politician, posing for photos, tending to the wants and needs of friends and family, who appeared to have been there in abundance. You’d not suspected he had just the heavy-lifting of 100-minute solo exercise—and that is counting “a little help of his (wooden) friends.” At 57, he still looks very much like the kid who never grew up—and, if he did grow up, his sense of play grew up expedentially.

What does one who began live-entertaining in the high-school auditorium and has been doing all his life make of Broadway? “Well, I didn’t know what to expect,” he admitted. “They haven’t written the primer for it so you just have to do it, y’know.” But I couldn’t feel greater. Broadway is the epitome of live theatre, so I just batted the hell out of it, I hope.”

It’s no exaggeration to say ventriloquism and magic have been Johnson’s life work (minus a few early formative years for him to find out about Harry Houdini and decide that would be the way to go). The sock that serves as a snake early in the show was something he dreamed up as a teenager, “and that’s the actual snake my mother made for me to take to high school.” Any artist, he feels, is led by his own particular art—and that is a good thing, he believes. “If I were talking about my music, I would have the same passion, the same dedication, the same feeling about that as I have about ventriloquism.” Continued...