Word: kalcheim
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...Mendelssohn (Jason Alexander) is the ultimate anticomputer nerd. He is threatening to dynamite the library where he works if its card-catalog system is replaced by PCs. Brian Dickey (Peter Falk) is the police negotiator--Columbo raised to the nth degree--trying to talk him out of anarchy. Lee Kalcheim's play, at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, sets them dueling metaphorically over the fate of modern civilization. Sometimes his targets are too easy (no more Starbucks jokes, please), but he has written fine, funny parts for the edgy, earnest Alexander and canny, counterpunching Falk. And his ending is a coup...
Tuned In BREAKFAST WITH LES AND BESS by Lee Kalcheim...
...this case, Les (Keith Charles) wants to retrieve his old happiness as a baseball broadcaster, while Bess (Holland Taylor) wants to keep climbing the celebrity ladder. Conceits of this sort always depend for their success on sending the audience out whistling their moral codes, but Lee Kalcheim is an amiable writer with a gift for constructing tight comic spots for Taylor and Charles to battle in and out of. The actress makes a tough lady sympathetic; the actor is a canny counterpuncher. Together they reinvent that splendid theatrical institution, the unhappy marriage, that no playwright looking for laughs should ever...
...last days of a campaign for the Senate, Lee Kalcheim's comedy has the stock political characters: a smooth-talking campaign manager with infinitely expandable ethics; a cynical speechwriter; a pretty, blonde volunteer; a hardboiled, right-wing Congressman; and the idiot senatorial candidate. Add to that mix the candidate's wife, who wants her husband to lose and does everything she can to make sure he does, like publicly demanding a divorce...
...wife aside, Winning is sometimes very funny.;Kalcheim, a TV writer who once wrote speeches for John Lindsay, knows the inside of a campaign headquarters, and he is probably familiar with idiot candidates as well. Bryan E. Clark is superbly smarmy as the campaign manager, Forbesy Russell is appropriately nubile as the blonde, and Richard Kuss gives one of the funniest performances of the year as a Congressman who enjoys kinky sex and kinkier politics. For long stretches they make you forget that Winning really isn't. - Gerald Clarke