Showbiz veteran is fine company
Reilly's engaging solo turn takes a fond look back at an eventful life
by Steven Winn, Chronicle Theater Critic
Monday, August 13, 2001

Charles Nelson Reilly is full of it.

In his generously stuffed solo show "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly," which opened Saturday to an adoring packed house at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, the voluble actor/director/game show fixture spills out Hollywood tributes and family memories, musical theater anecdotes and sentimental bromides, practical wisdom, self-deprecation, double takes, newspaper clippings and precision-timed punch lines. And he's just skimming the surface.

At an ambling time of close to three hours, Reilly's stage autobiography is a leisurely stroll. Once he's winked at his own seniority ("Whatever happened to you? I thought you were dead!"), the 70-year-old stage and screen veteran sets out on a chronological tour from his Bronx birth and comically bleak childhood to a Beverly Hills maturity burnished with household names (Julie Harris, Hal Holbrook, Jerry Stiller, Jerry Herman) and the joy of teaching actors.

"Save It for the Stage," co-written and directed by Paul Linke, has its deficiencies as a theatrical memoir. Some of the episodes are lumpily narrated.

Others are frustratingly clipped. And some pretty wide gaps remain in this lengthy account. Reilly's romantic life, for example, is left chastely untouched.

A CELEBRATION OF LIFE

Yet the evening is an engaging pleasure, an authentic celebration of a life built on friendship and faith. Reilly makes such warmly welcome company onstage, as comfortable in khakis and battered boat shoes as he is with his wriggling incarnation of his pal Mae West or memories of his ferocious mother, that the show takes on a homey, hearth-fire glow. "Save It for the Stage" is a triumph of personality over personal revelation.

Like many how-I-made-it-in-showbiz stories, Reilly's hews to the familiar elements of a painful upbringing, fate and magical interventions. Shaped by a talented artist father who missed his call from Walt Disney and a curdled Swedish mother who snuffed out hope, Reilly got his first break from a grade school teacher who cast him, against type, as Christopher Columbus.

"I had a wonderful supporting cast," Reilly gushes in recollection.

SENSE MEMORIES

Hard times -- illustrated by a delectable black comedy bristling with fish sticks and herring -- followed for the family. Reilly, with his flair for conjuring sense memories, goes deliriously beady-eyed at the thought of what tartar sauce could mean in times of deprivation.

The gods protected and guided him. He survived the notorious Hartford, Conn. , circus fire of 1944, found assorted "dream droppers," blundered into Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen's first acting class (with Steve McQueen, Jason Robards, Jack Lemmon, et al.) and became a star on Broadway (in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"), as a director ("The Belle of Amherst") and beyond.

Reilly pumps his story for exclamations of wonder ("Wow" is a recurring motif), near tears and the trick of withholding a big name for maximum suspense. He casts stars, including his friends, as the players in his life story. A haunting ghost light looms upstage.

But there's not a sanctimonious bone in Reilly's now somewhat creaky, bald- domed body. Plopping down on a couch or trotting over to a lectern to ring a celebratory bell for a joke, he has plenty of giddy fun with the show's Reilly- centric universe. "Tell your friends about this lavish production," he says, rolling his eyes at the cluttered (but canny) set.

Reilly knows how to flip something for comic impact, neatly deflating his friend Burt Reynolds' moon-eyed mope over Sally Field. He counts up his 27 appearances on TV one week and bleats, "Who do you have to f-- to get off?" And his devotion to the performer's art comes through in the tiniest brush stroke: seeing a young Harris surrounded by phantom moths in "The Member of the Wedding" a half century ago.

Yes, Reilly goes in for Hollywood mush. He had "the most amazing time" with Dean Martin. He loves his friends passionately. He and Harris have never stopped beaming at each other since they met in 1965.

And somehow it all rings pretty true. Reilly feels blessed, and he sends that feeling out across the footlights. Even a bird he finds on a beach gets the message in the final scene. Life, for Reilly, has been awfully good.

SAVE IT FOR THE STAGE (THE LIFE OF REILLY): By Charles Nelson Reilly. Co- written and directed by Paul Linke. (Through Sept. 9. At the New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. 2 hours, 50 minutes. Tickets: $20-$35. Call (415) 861-8972 or visit www.nctcsf.orgcq).

E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.

This article may be available online at the SF Chronicle website, sfgate.com.