OLD HATS

2013 & 2016 at the Signature Theatre, New York.

2013 Drama Desk Award

“All those New Yorkers frantically in search of the latest anti-aging breakthrough can breathe a sigh of a relief. Take the Botox doc off the speed dial, into the trash go all those fancy antioxidant creams, and the hours on the Zumba floor may be cut in half.

The secret to eternal youth can be found at much less expense, it appears. Buy yourself a pair of big, floppy shoes; absurdly baggy pants; and maybe a goofy-looking top hat for good measure, and watch the years melt away. That’s the firm impression anyone is likely to get from watching “Old Hats,” the ebullient new show from the veteran stage clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner.

This pair first teamed up just about 20 years ago to revive the lost art of vaudevillian jesting, and are currently a little north (Mr. Irwin) and south (Mr. Shiner) of 60. But in their new compendium of comic sketches, these supremely talented performers display the bubbly energy and shining vitality — not to mention amazingly elastic faces and limbs — of men half their age.

Some of the most charming sequences in “Old Hats” deploys fancy 21st-century technologies.

The red velvet curtain rises to find these two scrambling to escape a megaton boulder hurtling through a cave (think of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) amid other perils.

The manners and morals of contemporary American culture are also highlighted in splendid comic style in a sketch called “The Debate,” in which Mr. Irwin and Mr. Shiner play rivals for high office engaged in a wordless but increasingly lunatic battle of wits (make that witlessness) at adjacent podiums. Giant red arrows behind them slide up and down, instantly registering how their latest salvos have gone over with the audience.

With blinding, Mitt Romney-sized white teeth bursting from their gums, these two engage in increasingly loopy and craven attempts at voter pandering. (Hold on to your baby, folks.) Transforming themselves into eloquent if wordless comic satirists, they skewer the debased state of the country’s political discourse as nimbly as any pontificating pundit or smirking late-night talk show host possibly could.

A clown show without at least a smidgen of pathos would be like a doughnut without a hole, and so Mr. Shiner shuffles onstage in a tattered suit, with brown-bagged bottle in hand, to milk our tears in a solo sequence called “The Hobo.” Rummaging in a garbage can beside the park bench on which he settles to rest his weary bones, this poor fellow keeps pulling out little heartwarmers — a flower, a stuffed animal — that wilt and wither before his puddling eyes.

Inspiration almost never flags in “Old Hats,” whose highlights also include a vividly performed sendup of a sleazy magic act, in which Mr. Shiner’s smarmy, pony-tailed prestidigitator lubriciously ogles various members of the audience. Portraying his vivacious, big-wigged female assistant, Mr. Irwin looks on with increasing bitterness beneath the “ta-daaa” smiles….

Mr. Shiner mugs delightfully as the director, who grows increasingly dictatorial and disgusted at the inept antics of his performers and assistants. But if the volunteers Mr. Shiner recruits from the audience to assist in his woolly shenanigans are actually real amateurs, well, then, as Dorothy Parker once wagged — spoiler alert! — I am Marie of Romania. emulating classic vaudevillian clowns with their top hats, baggy pants and floppy shoes, the duo take ample advantage of newfangled technology.

But all these expert clowns really need is their endlessly malleable faces and elastic limbs. In "The Encounter," they play two men standing on a train station platform who get into a heated non-verbal argument, their bodies shrinking and expanding depending on which of them is besting the other.

The performers also juggle to perfection, although Irwin was clearly having an off night in their opening routine in which they engage in a contest involving their oversized hats. But as with all expert clowns, he made his failures even more amusing than his successes.

In a bittersweet sketch reminiscent of Chaplin, Shiner tugs at the heartstrings as a hobo who just can't get a break. But he's far more fun as a smarmy ponytailed magician with a female assistant (Irwin), whose tricks constantly flop. Pulling a hapless volunteer from the audience, he saws her in half with predictable but no less hilariously disastrous results.

Shiner also shines as an old-time movie director filming a Western scene using audience members as the performers. Although the sequence goes on a bit too long, his canny handling of his subjects, especially the more awkward ones, results in comic gold.”

The New York Times - Charles Isherwood

FOOL MOON

1992 - 2001 on Broadway & European Tour

Drama Desk Award, Tony Award, Outer Critics Circle Award

“Joyous. Surreal. David Shiner and Bill Irwin are magicians of the human body. One wishes their dance went on forever.”

TimeMagazine

“Fool Moon is a dream come true. Bill Irwin and David Shiner are on Broadway at last, right where they belong, now and forever.”

Edith Oliver - The New Yorker

“The funniest show on Broadway. Perfectly matched pearls of matchless silliness. Incomparable clown. The two in tandem are a triumph.”

Bill Raidy - Newhouse Syndicate

“To that short list of unbeatable combinations that include bacon and eggs, bourbon and soda, and Laurel and Hardy, you can now add Shiner and Irwin. Call the phenomenon comic combustion or maybe fools’ fission. What ever magic is at play, Fool Moon is a meltdown for the audience. Both men are master mimics, slapstick artists and elastic comic dancers. The Red Clay Ramblers’s eclectic repertory is that of fantasy roadhouse band. Bluegrass, New Orleans, classical folk and gospel sounds emerge in nutty profusion from these talented instrumentalists and singers, whose music maling is perfection but whose personalities are authentically idiosyncratic. The show passes by as dreamily as childhood, ending much too soon, but not before it touches us somewhere hidden and deep.”

Frank Rick - New York Times