What does the person who has everything need? If you're Barbra Streisand, it's a mini-mall in the basement of your Malibu home.
This odd but true fact is the jumping-off point for playwright Jonathan Tolins' heady and hilarious one-man show "Buyer & Cellar," currently being produced by Hennepin Theatre Trust at New Century Theatre in City Center.
"Buyer & Cellar" is a riff on the premise that Streisand's ersatz street of shops must surely have a shopkeeper. Enter Alex More (Sasha Andreev), a struggling actor looking for a day job. Although he describes himself at the outset of his employment as being "not that big a Barbra queen," as Alex relates his story, he slowly and surely falls under her spell.
Director Wendy Knox deftly balances this piece's more outrageous elements, while Andreev utterly captivates his audience over the course of 100 minutes.
Playing all the characters — including Streisand's husband, James Brolin, Alex's acerbic boyfriend Barry and Barbra herself — he creates a world that's quirkily eccentric and madly funny. He inhabits each character so thoroughly that even fast-paced bits of dialogue where he's jumping from Alex to Barry and back again unfold with complete clarity.
This work's speculative curiosity leads to some wildly comic scenes, such as one in which Barbra insists on purchasing one of her own possessions at one of her shops, testing the verisimilitude of the fantasy world she's created. It also leads, ultimately, to some nicely honed observations on the nature of fame, the need for love, and how to really enjoy frozen yogurt.
Lisa Brock is a Twin Cities theater critic.
