Something Different

by Carl Reiner

Genres: Plays

Unknown Binding

About the author

Carl Reiner was an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during his career. He has the distinction of being the only person to appear on all five incarnations of The Tonight Show. He is best known for his work in Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, and Ocean's Thirteen.

Reviews

[Martin Denton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something Different--which is the only playwriting credit for TV legend Carl Reiner--is a pretty bad play: a hopelessly dated mishmash about a blocked playwright named Sheldon "Bud" Nemerov who wrote an enormous hit in 1956 called "Seven Times Seven Plus One" and not a thing since (the show is set in 1967). To get the creative juices flowing again, Sheldon decides to recreate the physical conditions that bred that earlier success, transforming his den into a replica of his mother's rundown kitchen, complete with his lucky typewriter Natalie, a bag of noisy Indian nuts, and even a surrogate mother. Sheldon's wife Beth tries to stand-in as this last-named, but she doesn't have the stereotypical interfering Jewish Mother in her Gentile blood, prompting Sheldon to hire a mother from Mrs. Kupferman's Employment Agency. Sheldon's recreation of his childhood slum surroundings also require the importation of some live cockroaches, which are provided by Pest Controller Phil Caponetti. Eventually Something Different devolves into a series of mostly not-funny dirty jokes about Phil boffing Beth and Sheldon hiring a sexy actress named Ida Schwartz to be his "mother." There's also a running gag about Beth and Sheldon's twins.

Something Different is a poor play, but it functions well as a showcase. Reiner supplies plenty of comic set pieces for a director and cast to use to display their chops.