The moppet-haired guy who usually sits to the left of center square Whoopi Goldberg on "Hollywood Squares" is the latest Hollywood denizen to get his own one-man gig. While amusing at times, Bruce Vilanch's humorous diatribe exploring his long life as a gag writer, celebrity emergency jokester and sometime actor is seriously under-imagined and never as funny as the awards shows he has made a lucrative career writing for, it's almost like watching the outtakes of material that wasn't quite gut-busting enough to make it into Billy Crystal's oeuvre. Tracing his early days as a Chicago Sun-Times journalist (where he slipped words like "smegma" into the TV listings) to his current days as a line-feeder to the luminaries, Vilanch takes us on a rather tepid journey of Tinseltown, complete with riffs on the Osmonds and their Utah-Mormon upbringing to the misadventures behind the scenes of "Squares," one rather amusing bit telling of a black contestant who won all-expenses vacation to . . . Israel. He pitches little asides about Bette Midler, Goldberg, even a discarded Richard Gere gerbil joke at the Academy Awards, but all the while you're thinking: why does this afford a solo show at the Westbeth Theater Center? Vilanch is an engaging presence, but too often you get the impression that him telling you these anecdotes over a coffee would be preferable to sitting in an audience listening to them. His timing is less than impeccable, and the dirt you hope for never truly arrives, unless Tallulah Bankhead farting really loudly at an upstate theater event qualifies, which is this evening's unfortunate nightcap. (I appreciate a good fart joke as much as the last person, but if you're using it as a means of ending on an uproarious note, it might be advantageous to use someone audiences may actually relate more to in this day and age than Bankhead, of all people.) The whole affair has a tentative, night-at-the Improv feel and even his accompanist Dick Gallagher looks like he'd rather be somewhere else. The fact is, any garden-variety drag performer in New York City offers up more wit and panache and for only a fraction of the whopping $40 price. Vilanch throws in a few musical interludes too, but Lady Bunny he is not. Unlike, say, Margaret Cho (who occupied this venue last season), his work never reaches any kind of attained goal and leaves you with no lasting impression other than that he's amused by the idiocies of Hollywood and superstardom. Trey Parker and Matt Stone do this kind of thing on "South Park" week in and week out, in thirty minutes, and with more pointed satire and laughs to boot.
