Under My Skin
Opening Night: May 15, 2014
Closing: June 8, 2014
Theater: Little Shubert Theatre
In Under My Skin, a twist of fate leads to love and laughs when New York’s most eligible bachelor Harrison Baddish, and a single, working mother Melody Dent hilariously experience each other’s lives and see things from a very different perspective.
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May 14, 2014
If the words body-switch comedy don’t make your heart sink, discovering that the married playwrights behind Under My Skin are best known for their work on Who’s the Boss? and The Nanny might. The piece plays like a rejected ’80s-sitcom pilot, with references to Obamacare and selfies cut-and-pasted in. Melody (Kerry Butler, talent fully wasted) is a Staten Island working girl stuck in a dead-end job at a health-insurance company with a 9 to 5–style sexist, egotistical, bottom-line boss (Matt Walton). After both die (temporarily!) in an elevator crash, a bumbling angel (Dierdre Friel, getting laughs through sheer force of will) returns their spirits to the wrong bodies.
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May 6, 2014
The subject of the new comedy Under My Skin is very “now”: The sucky unfairness of health insurance. But the show’s cornball style is stuck in the ’80s or ’90s — which isn’t surprising since it’s by Robert Sternin and Prudence Fraser, who wrote for “Who’s the Boss” and developed “The Nanny.”
READ THE REVIEWMay 14, 2014
Fueled by “Freaky Friday” fantasy and actual health-insurance angst, Under My Skin is a body-swapping comedy with preexisting conditions — creaky bones and lameness. Credit married co-writers Robert Sternin and Prudence Fraser, who spent the 1980s and ’90s grinding sitcom sausage on “Who’s the Boss?” They also developed “The Nanny,” about a Queens hairdresser who gets inside a rich producer’s life. Their Off-Broadway debut follows Staten Island temp Melody (Kerry Butler), who really gets inside the life of wealthy Amalgamated Healthcare honcho Harrison (Matt Walton). Mel and Harrison unwittingly trade bodies, thanks to a stumblebum angel (Dierdre Friel). The setup is well-worn, the characters one-note and no one in the cast comes off especially well. Kirsten Sanderson’s stiff direction doesn’t help matters.
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May 14, 2014
When an underinsured office temp from Staten Island and her entitled billionaire boss die in an elevator accident in Under My Skin, the new body-swapping comedy at the Little Shubert Theater, an angel from Eternal Affairs restores them to life, each in the other’s physique. Do not be alarmed if this scenario brings on flashbacks from your cinematic past, circa the Reagan administration: Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin in “All of Me,” Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in “Trading Places,” Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl,” Tom Hanks in “Big.” There’s a reason those movies succeeded as entertainment. Under My Skin — written by Robert Sternin and Prudence Fraser, television veterans whose credits include the sitcoms “Who’s the Boss?” and “The Nanny” — is a comfortable diversion. Directed by Kirsten Sanderson, it treads familiar ground: income inequality and the gender divide, played for laughs and a lesson in empathy.
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