700 Sundays (2014)

Starring: Billy Crystal
Grade: A-

Finally, we get to see Billy Crystal on stage again! It’s been too long!

Summary

As we open with previously filmed scenes with Billy Crystal at his childhood home, we then go to center stage on Broadway. Out comes Crystal, getting into his act right away. He goes through most of his life chronologically and explains many important events that have happened to him in great animated detail. He does voices and impressions of family members and breathes a lot of high, emotional energy into an autobiographical account of the Crystal family that is a lot crazier than you would think. Some of the big topics he covers are early childhood, a meeting with a big-time gangster and his dad, his uncle and father’s involvement with the jazz music scene and Commodore Records, his love of baseball, stand-up comedy and his inspiration, puberty, the ups and downs of love, his father losing his job, his father passing away, the family’s feelings and eventual recovery, the story of how he met his wife, and the death of his mother (among other subtopics).

If you were wondering, the explanation of the title “700 Sundays” is that Sunday was the day that Crystal and his siblings had time to hang out with their dad. Every other day of the week, Crystal’s father was usually working. Sunday was the one day they all had with him. Crystal’s father died when he was 15, and he did the math. Roughly, he only had “700 Sundays” with him in his lifetime.

That was it. This gives a lot of meaning to the importance of the title and this special in general.

700 Sundays. That’s it.

My Thoughts:

The entirety of 700 Sundays is about the legendary comedian’s early life until his mid 20s. This means that nothing about his movies or any big professional happenings are discussed. This HBO special and concert film is strictly for big fans of Billy Crystal. Thankfully, I’m one of those people. Despite his age, it doesn’t seem like he’s lost a step at all. He brings his upbeat energy, emotive face, and perfect comedic timing to make this one man show worthwhile. Would you believe that in 2014 he was 66? As the crowd cheered for him during the final credits, he does a cartwheel!

I can’t even do a cartwheel now!

The show is a lot of fun, though it’s more of a one-man stage show rather than stand-up. The big house that is the backdrop of the stage has screens on it and it shows pictures and videos of certain events or people as Crystal talks us through it. It’s pretty cool. There are also these cues that he has for special characters that he plays, where a sound effects guy makes certain noises to accentuate what the character is doing, making the show feel like a live interactive experience. It adds a lot to the jokes too. There’s a particularly funny bit when Crystal lip synchs over the ending to the film Shane, and it got a pretty good laugh out of me.

Again, his timing can’t be beat.

You can tell that he worked his ass off in rehearsals to get through this act, without stammering at all, to hit every single beat and cue to make 700 Sundays as entertaining as possible. It would’ve been way too dry had he not added all of this extra stuff.

Though not every joke works, and some go on a little too long, there are some very funny quotables (as you would expect). This includes Crystal explaining that Yiddish is a combination of German and phlegm, Rosemary Clooney saying that her nephew is “the sexiest infant in the world”, and my personal favorite where he makes fun of the importance of chemistry and if it would ever come up again in his life once he gets out of high school. He asks, “Would anybody ever say to me, Billy, what’s lead?”. Lastly, there’s his realization about his future: “I realized there was 2 things I really wanted to be. I wanted to be a stand-up comic or a New York Yankee, or a really funny New York Yankee”.

Being a Crystal fan, I wanted to hear more about his foray into TV and film, but I realized that 700 Sundays is more of a passion project. Talking about some of the toughest moments of your life on stage can be very hard, but it seems like this was the release he needed. Obviously, he can act, and he’s done the show a few times so he’s gotten over the deaths of his parents for the most part, but you can still see the pain in his eyes when the subject is brought up. He remembers exactly the last words he said to both his mother and father before they passed away, and I imagine that no matter how many times he repeats those lines, it never gets any easier talking about it.

700 Sundays was pretty damn good. I learned a lot about Crystal’s early life, all of the famous people he encountered early in his childhood, his hardships, and the impact his parents had on his life. You may get emotional at times, especially when he talks about death, but he never loses the humor. Just as he’s able to bring you down, he’s able to bring you back up. Just that glance that he gives the audience after he says or does something ridiculous is enough to get a laugh out of me every time. 700 Sundays is well-written, well-rehearsed, and very well performed by Billy Crystal. Though it may not be for non-Crystal fans, it’s still a very fun and informative stage show about the legendary comic.

I would’ve loved to have seen this in person.