ZERO HOUR Press
Written & Performed by Jim Brochu
Directed by Piper Laurie
Channeling Zero Mostel’s wild moods, crazy humor and righteous anger, Jim Brochu reintroduces us to this funny, fantastically contrary man whose penchant for truth-telling has been sorely missed.
Running August 29 - September 27 2009
Metro Weekly - 4 Stars!
Zero to Hero
Questions from the past play into our present -- and future -- in Theater J's Zero Hour and Woolly Mammoth's Eclipsed.
by Tom Avila
Published on September 10, 2009
On Oct. 14, 1955, the actor and comedian Zero Mostel was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was asked if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He was asked, in a phrase that is as unsettling today as it was then, to ''name names.''
Established in the late 1930s, HUAC's mission was to investigate individuals and organizations with alleged ties to the Communist Party. The committee paid particular attention to entertainers, those individuals whose voices were heard loudly and widely. HUAC's work would later be rightly seen as a modern-day witch hunt, destroying lives and careers in the name of some unfounded greater good. CONTINUE READING
Washington Jewish Weekly
Modern-day morality play
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
The clown prince of Broadway was an angry man. Funny man Zero Mostel, it seems, had a bitter streak that adds heft and intrigue to actor, creator, writer Jim Brochu's one-man bio-drama, Zero Hour, which explores the life of the rubbery-faced actor.
Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Brochu has the oversize dimensions, literally the weight and heft, to carry off a more-than-believable Mostel impersonation. But Brochu offers more than an off-the-shelf impersonation of the character comedian with his bulgy eyes, grimaces, grins and groaners. At the end of 90 minutes, Brochu has become a reincarnation of the late, great Mostel, a one-of-a-kind stage presence -- famed for his Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Onstage at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Goldman Theater through Sept. 27, Zero Hour introduces us to a man who lived life with a vengeance. In the guise of a newspaper interview with an unseen New York Times reporter, Mostel's story unfolds over two acts. CONTINUE READING
Washington City Paper
Zero Hour: A hilarious paean to the indefatigable Zero Mostel.
By Trey Graham
Jim Brochu is Zero Mostel: the shrugging, the mugging, the right hand aloft to screw in that invisible light bulb, the eyes bugging as if to say “What, that’s the best laugh you’ve got?” The two-tone beard, the thinning hair scraped back to front, the screwed-up face, the waggling jowls—and those cadences, pinched and outraged, punchy and perfectly pitched. As a comic, Mostel had no peer, and as a mimic, Brochu does his hero proud: When it’s going for the funny bone, Zero Hour is a laff riot, down to the “I’m a little teapot” imitation excavated from Mostel’s early days in stand-up. CONTINUE READING
Express Night Out
How to Calculate Zero: Jim Brochu's 'Zero Hour'
Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
ZERO MOSTEL WAS hailed as the greatest performer on the American stage, but his star has receded since his 1977 death. Fortunately, Jim Brochu is putting Mostel's name in lights again, playing him with ferocious anger as well as with great joy.
Even many who have heard of Mostel may not know he was a painter first. Brochu's Mostel does touch on the star's triumphs — in "Fiddler on the Roof," "The Producers" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" — during a rude, hilarious and touching autobiographical interview, but the interview takes place in a painting studio.
Brochu, looking like an insane Santa Claus, is wildly intense, expressive, manic and comic. He announces he's made 25 Broadway shows, 50 movies and 10,000 paintings. He insists on painting a visiting (unseen) newspaperman and asks whether his guest purchased his coat during a total eclipse. "Art is life," he offers. "Of course you can quote me." CONTINUE READING
DC Theatre Scene
Zero Hour
Posted By Josh Fixler On September 8, 2009 @ 2:49 pm In Features, Our Reviews | 1 Comment
A solo show is a difficult thing to pull off. It is a monumental task for one person to keep an audience engaged for a whole show, and the line between wonderful and dreadful is razor thin. But in Zero Hour, Jim Brochu proves he is well up to the challenge. He tackles the complex and contradictory life of Zero Mostel with a flourish that is captivating from the moment the lights come up. Brochu, who also wrote the script, brings this mammoth of the theater back to life for one more night of thought provoking entertainment.
Brochu is as dynamic as the hysterical (in both senses of the word) Mostel, the star of Broadway, film, and TV. The play treats us to an opportunity that may never have existed in life: to be present for an evening in Mostel’s private sanctuary, his art studio. Initially, this setting seemed odd. Why set a play about a famous actor in an art studio? But Mostel is quick to explain that his passion was always painting, and that he only acted “to buy more paint”. I am glad that painting is an expensive hobby, or the world might have been deprived of its Tevye, or Pseudolus or Max Bialystock. And so, we enter Mostel’s inner sanctum. There is, in the play, an unseen and unheard newspaper reporter, asking Mostel questions about his life, but this character seems indulgently willing to let Mostel wander from story to story with few interjections. In this way, the play doesn’t feel much like an interview, but more like watching the inner workings of Mostel’s mind. He interrupts himself, sometimes with a witty line, and sometimes because he appears to have forgotten what he is saying.. CONTINUE READING
EDGE DC
Zero Hour
by Rebecca Thomas
EDGE Contributor
Tuesday Sep 8, 2009
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting when I went to go see Zero Hour by Jim Brochu which is playing August 29-September 27 at Theater J. I didn’t know a great deal about the show-only that it was neither a title nor a subject matter that I would usually pick out of a line-up. You’ll thus understand my utter astonishment and delight at discovering Zero Hour to be such a prolific and ground-breaking performance.
There is something refreshing about the simplistic format of the show. The entire performance is a one-man show in which Jim Brochu-the genius who wrote the play-plays the part of Zero Mostel, the self-professed "painter who had an acting habit.’ All of Zero Hour plays out in one place-Mostel’s art studio-and is set towards the end of his life. CONTINUE READING
WASHINGTON TIMES
THEATER: Sum, substance of Zero Mostel Humor born out of bitterness, deep empathy
By Jayne Blanchard
It is no wonder Zero Mostel was a substantial man. No mere ectomorph could contain such a mass of contradictions. He possessed girth and surprising grace. His humor contained lethal truths as well as the shtick of a borscht belt comedian. He craved attention but also isolation. He was a man of integrity who stood up for what he believed in but was pragmatic enough to know when it was time to compromise and get to work.
Actor and writer Jim Brochu has the size — physical and emotional — of Zero Mostel in his funny and piercing one-man show, "Zero Hour," playing at Theater J under the astute direction of actress Piper Laurie. CONTINUE READING
WASHINGTON POST
Jim Brochu Ably Brings The Hero to 'Zero Hour'
Brochu builds his account around the defining trauma of Mostel's life, his 1955 subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (By Michael Lamont)
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 4, 2009
Here we are, back at Madame Tussauds's School of Drama. You may recall some of the other recent exhibitions: Valerie Harper at Arena Stage as Tallulah Bankhead ("Looped"), Emily Skinner at Signature Theatre in the guise of Mae West ("Dirty Blonde").
The fascination with celebrity impersonation goes on and on. And actors, being actors, seem to love nothing more than slipping into the skins of other actors. So now, the writer-performer Jim Brochu is moving among us, as the embodiment of the great Broadway clown Zero Mostel, in a polished if predictable solo show at Theater J. CONTINUE READING
WASHINGTON JEWISH WEEK
All-American actress saddened at never having a Jewish role. Piper Laurie directs 'Zero Hour' at Theater J
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
As a young Hollywood actress, with her red hair and green eyes, Piper Laurie played the ingenue, the pretty girl, wholesome, all-American. Later she wowed film and television audiences in searing dramas like The Days of Wine and Roses and opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler, for which she was nominated for a best actress Oscar.
In her career's third, but not final, act in 1976, Laurie made a comeback as the off-kilter, religious fanatic mother in the teen horror film Carrie.
And now she's back, directing Zero Hour, Theater J's season opener, a study of imperious actor, sometime funny man and larger-than-life stage presence Zero Mostel. Zero Hour, which is playwright/actor/director Jim Brochu's love letter to the blacklisted Broadway star acclaimed for his poignant Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and bug-eyed Max Bialystock in the original movie The Producers. CONTINUE READING
WASHINGTON POST
'Zero': A Sum Of Many Parts
By Jonathan Padget
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 28, 2009
When writer and actor Jim Brochu picks up the phone at his home in Los Angeles, he is eager to share some good news.
He has just learned that "Zero Hour," his one-man play about the late, larger-than-life actor Zero Mostel, which opens Saturday at Theater J, has been picked up for an off-Broadway run in the fall.
But there's bad news, too: Brochu has picked up something else -- an annoying cold.
Yet even the misfortune has an upside. "I think I caught the cold from Topol!" he says gleefully.
Brochu explains that he met Chaim Topol after a recent performance of "Fiddler on the Roof," the musical in which Topol has toured extensively in the decades since winning the role of Tevye -- originated by Mostel on Broadway in 1964 -- when the hit show was adapted for the screen. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
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