INTERVIEW: Who cares about Leo Reich? Apparently a lot of people
Photo: Leo Reich stars in Literally Who Cares?, his off-Broadway debut. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by official website.
Leo Reich wants everyone to know that it’s all a joke. That’s right, his off-Broadway debut in his standup comedy / theater mashup, lovingly called Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?, is meant to be funny and a parody of confessional monologue shows that often populate the theater scene. For audience members, it won’t take long to realize just how funny Reich can be. His show has been met with acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it originated, and in London. Now it’s playing a limited engagement until Saturday, March 11 at the Greenwich House Theater in the West Village of Manhattan.
“It’s all very surreal,” Reich said in a recent phone interview about the New York City transfer. “It’s so interesting doing it in a different country and finding out what this nation finds funny, which is different. There’s a lot of different stuff, changing references and stuff. I would say a slightly more earnest crowd that maybe takes slightly longer to realize that I’m joking, but that has been fun to play with.”
Some of the individual jokes in Literally Who Cares? go back years and have been part of Reich’s standup routine. As the comedian said, a few of these stories he’s been telling since his days at university, but the creation of this new show dates back to the planned Edinburgh Fringe in 2020. Of course, that was the year everything changed.
“That was going to be a straight down-the-line confessional, anecdotal standup show, nothing but me talking into the microphone, all very sincere, and just talking about my life,” Reich said. “And then the pandemic happened, so thank God I was not able to perform that show. … And then essentially over the pandemic, that show kind of evolved into a parody of itself because I had to sit with the idea that I had intended to go to Edinburgh with an hour about how my life is hard, and then suddenly we’re in a global pandemic. It just became [obvious] that my life was not hard at all, and I thought it was a funny thing to do to just sort of dive into the part of my personality that thought that would ever have been a good idea or ever justified. That’s really what the show ended up being, a character breakdown of the kind of person who would perform an hour of standup comedy about their own life.”
Reich called his brand of comedy slightly out there, so he wasn’t sure of the commercial prospects of bringing Literally Who Cares? around the world and back again (after New York City, he heads back to London and also to Australia with the show).
“I made it very much for the few people that I thought would like it and didn’t expect there to be many of those people basically,” he said. “I was fully prepared for a lot of people not to connect with it or get it, and a lot of people didn’t connect with it or get it. But it was just so great that the people that did like it were so vocal about it, and it found its audience really quickly.”
When the producers approached Reich at the Edinburgh Fringe about transferring the show and giving the standup routine a larger life, he wasn’t sure what to make of the offer. He actually thought the conversation was, well, a joke.
“The producers of this run came to the show in Edinburgh, toward the end of the Fringe,” Reich said. “I didn’t completely trust it because it felt like a scene from a bad biopic movie. After the show, they were like, ‘Hey, we’re Broadway producers. We think your show would be a hit in New York.’ I was like, ‘Is this like a character act? Like, what’s happening?’ Since then, they’re the best and have really taken quite a big swing with this show, which is not the most crowd-pleaser-y show at all. But they really backed it, so since then, we’ve been trying to find a home for it and trying to figure out how to do it. It’s crazy that we’ve managed to make it happen.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares? continues through Saturday, March 11 at the Greenwich House Theater in the West Village of Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
