Play Review Carrie Fisher Brings

Play Review

Carrie Fisher brings "Wishful Drinking" to New York!

Theatre: Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio

Hollywood film star, acclaimed screenwriter, bestselling novelist and newest Jenny Craig spokesperson Carrie Fisher has arrived in New York to begin her award-winning one-woman show "Wishful Drinking" to the Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54 for a limited engagement three-week engagement from October 2, 2011 through October 30, 2011. Wishful Drinking is a highly entertaining stage memoir in which Ms. Fisher spells out her bumpy childhood as daughter of Hollywood actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher and thrill-ride years as an adult via generally hilarious anecdotes about her addiction to tablets, cocaine, alcohol and celebrity. T he gifted actress that became a cultural icon when she starred as "Princess Leia" in the first Star Wars Trilogy at age 19 recounts her true and intoxicating, dazzling, dizzying, and dysfunctional tale of life as daughter of two matinee-idol parents in the first act. When Ms. Fisher was two, her parents divorced after her father left Ms. Reynolds for her best friend and maid of honor, actress Elizabeth Taylor, the widow of Eddie's best friend Mike Todd.

Ms. Fisher affirms her place among Hollywood royalty with projections, often involving movie excerpts that fall from the fly, such as an over dimensioned photo diagram which she uses to explain her complicated family relationships like ties to her late father Eddie Fisher, her ex-stepmother Elizabeth Taylor and her ex-stepfather Harry Carl. The play then wades into Ms. Fisher's struggle with bipolar disorder, and her overcoming an addiction to prescription medication, cocaine and alcohol, her marriage to -- and then divorce from -- musician Paul Simon, her numerous ill- fated romances and many other things in the second act. Boozing is hardly mentioned, but whenever there is an opportunity to throw in a line about her passion for other drugs, she does so.

"I am Carrie Fisher, and I am an alcoholic -- and this is a true story," she says to open. The show, she explains, "is a pathetic attempt to make up the lack of attention of my birth." She then throws light on the baffled audience describing that crooner father Eddie fainted during delivery and all the nurses were helping him while she was entering the world. As she paces back and forth her life in something that looks like a black pajama, she uses the same irony and acerbic wit she poured into bestsellers like Postcards from the Edge and The Best Awful. The last part of the show, Ms. Fisher, now at age 54, has her old and well-known Princess Leia "Cinnamon Bun Hairstyle" telling her audience how much she hated her character's hairdo since she felt it made her face look even rounder while taking two hours every day to style.

Ms. Fisher shows a somnambulistic safety of using words like play-dough manipulating them cleverly and utmost witty. On the subject of her substance abuse she twists Karl Marx's famous quote "Religion is the opiate of the masses" to report she took "masses of opiates religiously." Further mocking-up the whole endeavor she involves audience members into the play -- even to the extent of handing out drink vouchers. Ms. Fisher was joined on stage by an unexpected guest during last Sunday evening's opening performance of Wishful Drinking -- the star's mother, Ms. Debbie Reynolds. The legend movie actress and "Singing in the Rain" star was "incognito" watching her daughter's show mocking Ms. Reynolds' own career and three marriages. Ms. Reynolds made her presence only known to the surprised audience by jumping on stage to perform a duet of "Happy Days are here again" in the show's finale with Fisher.

Wishful Drinking is very much a Hollywood insider piece. Directed by Tony Taccone and designed by Alexander V. Nichols the play is based on Ms. Fisher's book of the same name. The one-woman show is extremely hilarious and funny. Ms. Fisher is witty, clever, acerbic, ironical and consistently entertaining at the same time. Sitting in the audience makes you feel participating in a slumber party to exchange confidences.