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Three & One-Half Stars Out of Five
Recommended by Michael Vaughan
An Independent, Unpaid & Unsolicited Review

Fully Committed

On the Firing Line with Mark McKinney
At Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre until January 6^th
416-872-555

Michael Vaughan
November 15, 2001

The highly entertaining 80 minute skit features the antics of Kids –In-The-Hall Mark McKinney who musters up enough energy to play all the roles as he man’s the phones at a swanky upscale hot-hot-hot Manhattan restaurant .  It gets a big thumbs up by Richard Ouzounian in a four star Toronto Star review (see below). Globe & Mail Kate Taylor who is somewhat less enthusiastic still gives it a solid three stars. Meanwhile at the Toronto Sun, John Colbourn seems lukewarm on the production suggesting (incorrectly  to my mind) that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in TO!  As far as I am concerned, Fully Committed shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a passion for restaurant  dining.   

timeouttoronto.com details

Fully Committed
Written by Becky Mode
Directed by Nicholas Martin
Starring Mark McKinney

Closes:
Sunday, January  6, 2002

Location:
Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge Street 416-872-5555.

Price:
Tuesday  to Sunday  ~ $28.50 to $57

Rating: ***
A palatable little number
By Kate Taylor
Globe & Mail ~ Friday, October 26, 2001  

To call Fully Committed a play is to exaggerate its scope. This 80-minute off-Broadway hit by writer Becky Mode is an extended skit and like all good skits, it's all about situation. Sam is an aspiring actor who mans the phones at Manhattan's trendiest four-star restaurant where patrons will bribe, if not actually kill, to get a table. And through that headset, he's channelling about three dozen other wackos, including the sadistic chef, the snooty maître d' and a whole switchboard worth of pushy patrons.

  Mode originally developed the one-man play and its many characters with actor Mark Setlock, but who better to undertake this parade of hysteria than Kids in the Hall alumnus Mark McKinney? He returns to Canada from New York, where he's now building a career as a stage actor, to perform Fully Committed at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre for a limited run that opened Wednesday. The results are highly amusing.

The plot, such as it is, involves Sam's attempts to land a role in a show at Lincoln Center and get time off to spend Christmas with his widowed father while stamping out brush fires in the restaurant. When Naomi Campbell's personal assistant is calling about a vegan dinner for 15 and the lady whose husband invented Saran Wrap is insisting on table 31, this has to be the day that Sam's absent co-worker forgot to book the chef a helicopter to the airport and to pencil in that reservation for the Zagats (of restaurant guidebook fame). Fully Committed -- that's the phrase the chef prefers to fully booked -- is a small but sharply targeted satire of New York ego, over which our put-upon hero eventually triumphs.

If Sam is looking haggard as he juggles phone lines and personalities, McKinney himself is in full control. He dances nimbly through the many roles, distinguishing each character through delicious caricature and serving up the full potential of a simple comic dish.

Rating: ****
A fully satisfying meal
By Richard Ouzounian
The Toronto Star ~ October 25, 2001

I recommend this show with no reservations, although you're definitely going to need them to get in.

To cut to the chase, Mark McKinney's performance in Fully Committed makes this the must-see, can't-miss, hot-ticket show in town this fall.

Becky Mode's "delicious comedy" about the perils of four-star restaurant-going in Manhattan still seems devilishly funny, even if the state of the economy makes extravagant dining a bit less de rigueur than it was, say, a year ago.

McKinney plays Sam, an aspiring actor who works as the reservations clerk in the basement of a super trendy New York eatery. ("I'm sorry, we're fully committed for that evening," is the mantra.)

He also plays more than three dozen other characters, including the egomaniacal chef, the arrogant maitre'd and all the hyper-demanding customers.

Mode's script is wisely about more than fun and games in the world of haute cuisine. There's a slight but affecting plot about whether or not Sam will get home for Christmas to his recently widowed father back in Indiana.

But that, as they say, is the gravy. The meat and potatoes are the dazzling comic characters that McKinney summons up with ever-increasing rapidity.

He's delicious as Bryce, the strident secretary to supermodel Naomi Campbell, with his demands for vegan tasting menus and halogen bulbs. Or as the imperious dowager Carol-Ann Rosenstein Fishburne who announces "I'll stay on hold forever!"

Perhaps his most memorable customer is the demented Mrs. Sebag, who on being told her reservation is lost, contorts her face into a scream worthy of Edvard Munch, and howls like Janet Leigh in Psycho.

Inside the restaurant, things are just as insane, with the simpering British receptionist, Stephanie, contrasting nicely with the blowsy Gallic swagger of Jean-Claude, the maitre'd.

And of course there's the nameless "Chef," an overgrown child who combines the worst elements of Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagassé.

McKinney nails them all, creating instant characters with a slump of a shoulder or a flick of a wrist. His vocal impersonations are equally deft and he finds a way to squeeze every last ounce of variety out of the strident bleat of the Upper East Side.

The one possible criticism involves the show's pacing. The arc of hysteria that drives the evening starts a bit more slowly here than it did when I saw it in San Francisco, but as McKinney grows more comfortable in the role, he surely will be able to put the pedal to the metal and take off.

But even now, McKinney is hilariously triumphant.

He's the Susur Lee of laughs, the Mark McEwan of merriment, the Jamie Kennedy of comedy.

 If you could use some humour these days (and who couldn't?) then head down to the Winter Garden.

 But get your tickets fast, before they wind up "fully committed."

http://www.thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1005649371751

Partly committed
Toronto not yet ready for Becky Mode's take on life
By John Coulbourn
Toronto Sun ~ October 26, 2001

TORONTO -- It's a show that was never intended to play in Peoria.

  Which is fine, because Toronto ain't exactly Peoria.

  But, much as we'd like to convince ourselves otherwise, we're a long, long way from Manhattan, and the difference between our Hogtown milieu and the arcane and twisted world of the Big Apple -- the broad setting for Becky Mode's Fully Committed -- is substantial.

  More specifically, the play, which opened here in Toronto Tuesday night at the Winter Garden Theatre, is set in "the basement of a four-star restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan." It takes us inside a world where dining is a blood sport and the pressure cooker is a lifestyle, not a kitchen utensil.

Of course, Toronto's got trendy eateries too, but, try as they might to convince us otherwise, Toronto's socialistas are playing in the minor leagues compared to the pros that inhabit Fully Committed. In Toronto, a popular restaurant is still simply all booked up: In New York, it is "fully committed" -- or was, prior to Sept. 11.

So, while we might laugh at the shenanigans as New York's finest try to bully their way into the heart of Manhattan's in-spot through Sam, the hapless aspiring actor who finds himself alone on the reservations desk, the laughter that comes with the shock of recognition also rings with faint notes of "Wish we were there."

Sadly, that is the least of Fully Committed's problems in this Toronto incarnation. Though his commitment to the task at hand is both obvious and commendable, former-Kid-In-The-Hall Mark McKinney succeeds only in defining the gulf that separates a gifted comic from a gifted comic actor.

Under the direction of Daniel Goldstein, who has restaged the work on the original direction of Nicholas Martin, McKinney turns in a performance desperately in need of shaping. A comic need only be funny in the moment -- and McKinney certainly is -- but a comic actor is called upon to shape a performance and integrate it with character, often sacrificing a good laugh early in the show for a great laugh at its conclusion.

As it hit the stage on its opening night, Fully Committed takes little or no notice of the comic building blocks the playwright has supplied in this tale of a somewhat ordinary man who finds himself in a situation that is spinning more and more out of control by the moment. This is a play that should build to a frenzy, and instead, from a performance point of view, it just plods along.

 McKinney is at his strongest parodying the Manhattan man eaters who patronize his restaurant -- supermodels, socialites, reviewers, hangers-on and wannabes -- but he fails to flesh out Sam, the character around whom the story pivots.

Add to that the fact that, even in Manhattan, this is a show that would play best in an intimate theatre far removed from the Winter Garden, and you can't help but feel that the producers have sent us a whole load of gladioli, hoping we rubes will think they are orchids.

 http://www.canoe.ca/TheatreReviewsF/fullycommitted-sun.html