The 1965 Juan Marichal-John Roseboro fight is the jumping point for a new one-man show by Roger Guenveur Smith, who received acclaim for his performance as Huey Newton several years ago. The play is reviewed today in the New York Times:

Mr. Smith does a kind of standup theater. (The show has no formal script.) It’s a high-wire act that frequently feels too free associative.

Mr. Smith can be a charming raconteur, smiling and chatting with the audience about the 1965 Dodgers team that included Maury Wills and Sandy Koufax. He can also have a full-tilt actorly intensity (so many tears!) that sometimes overwhelms the material, especially the personal reminiscences.

The bigger problem, though, is that Mr. Smith, who also directed, hasn’t been a ruthless enough editor. He mixes the resonant and the germane (Watts, his father’s business, being black in the ’60s) with bits that don’t quite fit (his recent personal history), and can overreach when trying to connect things. (The projections, by Marc Anthony Thompson, at times suffer from the same problem.)

But when Mr. Smith returns to Roseboro and Marichal, “Juan and John” picks up. Easily inhabiting each man, Mr. Smith shows what a good actor he can be and reminds us what a good story he has to tell. The two eventually patched things up, and when Marichal, who had been kept out of the Hall of Fame because of the incident, calls Roseboro to tell him that he’s finally made it in, Mr. Smith’s tears hit home.

The concept is interesting enough, but this sounds just like the kind of theater experience that reminds me why I generally don’t cotton to one-man performances–just too much self-indulgence for me. I could be wrong, who knows? If anyone sees the show, drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think.