Reviews NYCOff-Broadway Published 1 August 2024

Review: Cellino v. Barnes at Asylum NYC

Asylum NYC ⋄ July 23-October 13, 2024

The Cellino and Barnes jingle may be a cursed earworm, but the play about their rise and downfall is charmingly silly. Loren Noveck reviews.

Loren Noveck
Noah Weisberg and Eric William Morris in Cellino v. Barnes. Photo: Marc Franklin

Noah Weisberg and Eric William Morris in Cellino v. Barnes. Photo: Marc Franklin

If you lived in New York in the early years of the millennium, you know Cellino and Barnes: their faces on billboards or the sides of buses, their ubiquitous, nonsensically simple jingle on the radio. If you were lucky, you never got any closer than that, because who wants to know a personal injury lawyer anyway? And when the firm fell apart in 2019, followed shortly thereafter by the death of Barnes in a small-plane crash, it became a cautionary tale of machismo and hubris: lawyers who pulled a few too many shady tricks. You might think that a catchy jingle is not enough to build either an exceptionally successful law career or a theatrical comedy, and you’d end up being wrong about both. 

There’s not a lot of meat on Cellino v. Barnes’s bones, but it’s witty enough, silly enough, and–perhaps oddly–sweet enough to go down easy. (Its sentimental moments may be telegraphed from a mile away, but sometimes tropes become tropes because they work.) Co-writers Mike B. Breen and David Rafailedes elevate what could easily be a padded piece of sketch comedy (it doesn’t help that Saturday Night Live has tackled Cellino and Barnes on more than one occasion) into a buddy comedy that takes gentle aim at everything wrong with capitalism, the legal profession, and masculinity at large. Cellino v Barnes embraces its goofiness, keeps things to a tight seventy minutes, and amps up its laugh quotient with two highly enjoyable performances full of impeccable comic timing. 

While Eric William Morris (Cellino) and Noah Weisberg (Barnes) bear a decent resemblance to the real figures, especially once you pop a bald cap on Weisberg, Breen and Rafailedes, along with co-directors Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse, have pushed both a few notches farther in the direction of archetype/caricature. Morris’s Cellino is a hapless nepo baby who can’t tell the difference between a shredder and a fax machine (a moment of idiocy that turns out to drive several plot points). He’s perpetually on the verge of getting fired–boss’s son notwithstanding–until Barnes comes along, his ethical compass is none too accurate, and he’s far from the sharpest tool in the box. In fact, his main goal in life is to figure out how to achieve success without working any harder than the minimum: rather than being a home-run hitter, he wants to be the guy hit by the pitch and given the walk. Still, once in a while his half assed ideas can be spun into gold (“all good advertising flows through the jingle,” for example). 

Weisberg’s Barnes is an earnest striver; his ambition comes from how much he loves his job, and he loves it because he’s good at it, with an encyclopedic memory for case law. He’s a nerd with a fierce sense of loyalty and a deep well of patience for Cellino’s antics and incompetence–what does he care if his partner is a dingbat, as long as the clients come in? They’re ant and grasshopper through and through. Cellino’s almost entirely unearned confidence takes him far, but he’s nothing without Barnes to execute. Barnes’s actual skills keep the firm afloat, and . . . well, he’d probably be just fine without Cellino, but he’s loyal and honest and that partnership becomes the core of his professional identity.

And it’s that palpable loyalty–the genuine affection that Morris and Weisberg bring to the table–that makes the show work. There’s something heartfelt about their bromance that injects just enough emotional stakes to make us care, if not about personal injury law, about these two dudes trying to get rich off of it. The partnership works for nearly twenty years, until each of their forms of capitalist ambition takes a nasty turn: Cellino’s into a bit of loan sharking that’s exactly as half-assed as everything else he does, and Barnes’s into a megalomaniacal plan to integrate vertically: acquiring their own ambulance service and hospital so they’re a full-service personal injury shop. They came together to make money, and they’ll split up over how.

Cellino at one point suggests that if an audience member were to look them up in Wikipedia, they’d find most of the show was true. As it turns out, the Wikipedia page is pretty light on the details, but then again so is the play. We gloss over most of the partnership years via a jingle montage–which, to be fair, is hilarious. We get only the vaguest allusions to any sort of life outside the office (except for Cellino’s damaged relationship with his dad). Somehow one of the longest scenes is an argument about alabaster toilets. (It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.)

Morris and Weisberg put enough topspin on every line to pull jokes out of the driest corners of the script. Taylor and Wyse keep the staging simple, with effective use of sound (design by Chiara Pizzirusso,with original music by Max Mueller) and office furniture (set by Riw Rakkulchon). For one thing, they get a number of laughs out of the various ways to prop a foot on a desk drawer handle for maximum manspreading posture. Yes, even at 75 minutes, this gets a little baggy about two-thirds of the way through. Yes, the creators can’t resist throwing in a splashy closing scene that feels more like an excuse for a few video effects. But for pure silly fun, Cellino v. Barnes hits the mark. 

And yes, you will be singing that cursed earworm of a jingle for days. 


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.

Review: Cellino v. Barnes at Asylum NYC Show Info


Produced by Mix and Match Productions

Directed by Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse

Written by Mike B. Breen and David Rafailedes

Scenic Design Riw Rakkulchon

Costume Design Rickie Lurie

Lighting Design Aiden Bezark

Sound Design Chiara Pizzirusso

Cast includes Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg

Original Music Max Mueller

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 75 minutes


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