Last Friday I saw New Haven Theatre Co. romp through Steve Martin’s intellectually silly Picasso at the Lapin Agile. On Sunday I went to Yale’s Peabody Museum with my daughters to see the high-tech multi-media Black Hole exhibit there. This was the umpteenth time I’d entered the Black Hole, but the first time I’d really heard Albert Einstein speak there. A voice purporting to be the great scientist’s leads you through an exercise in measuring the relativity of time and weight in black holes (though that term was not yet being used in Einstein’s day).
My father was British and my mother’s family was Austrian, so I may be overly sensitive to how some actors mangle European accents. Still, whoever recorded the bit for the museum exhibit really overdoes it, seemingly taking cues from Walter Matthau’s uberdotty interterpretation of Einstein in the Marshall Brickman movie I.Q. You know, lots of chirpiness and “Ja?”s.
Gave me even more respect for Jeremy Funke’s rather even-tempered, if properly comical, voicing of old Al in the NHTC show, not to mention Mark Nelson in the first national tour.
Next stage up after Picasso at the Lapin Agile for aspiring Einstein impersonators: Terry Johnson’s timeless tragicomedy Insignificance, which has its parodic qualities (besides Einstein, it conjures up caricatures of Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Joseph McCarthy) but requires depth and suspenseful pacing.