THE LAUGH TRACK

Situation comedy groundbreakers Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh deserve to be saluted, and the cast assembled on the International City Theatre stage to salute them definitely give it their all, but the sitcomish approach playwright Wendy MacLeod has taken in The Laugh Track ends up less successful in execution than it might promise to be on paper.

MacLeod takes for granted that a 2026 audience will be familiar with a pair of TV pioneers whose collaboration with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz ended way back in 1960 (though they continued writing for Lucy up to the mid-1980s), and that may be too much to assume.

This was also the case with ICT’s last production, Conscience, a dramedy that recounted the life of Margaret Chase Smith (coincidentally US Senator from Maine during the very years Lucy and Desi ruled the airwaves) through the alternating viewpoints of its four fourth-wall-breaking characters, an approach that, for this reviewer at least, worked better than MacLeod’s with The Laugh Track.

Here, we plunge head first into the story as comedy writers Bob (Josh Odsess-Rubin) and Maddie (Alli Brown) find themselves hired to develop a TV sitcom for Lucille Ball (Jennifer Sorenson), fresh from airwaves success in radio’s My Favorite Husband, and because Maddie is the duo’s female member, to fetch coffee for misogynistic CBS V.P. for Programming Harry (Hunter Bodine).

The Laugh Track then covers much of the same territory Aaron Sorkin explored in Being The Ricardos as did multiple Lucy-Desi TV biopics, from the married couple’s insistence on shooting on film on a Hollywood sound stage in front of a live studio audience, to their refusal to accept the studio’s belief that Americans wouldn’t buy all-American Lucy’s marriage to a Cuban, to the hitherto unheard of integration of a star’s pregnancy (sorry, make that “being in the family way”) into a show’s storyline because that might suggest that she and her husband had actually had sex in one or both of their twin beds.

The difference this time round is that the focus is squarely on I Love Lucy’s two groundbreaking writers, whose Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn-style opposites-attract banter might lead audiences to believe, erroneously, that romance is in the cards. (Both did get married, but not to each other.)

Tonally, The Laugh Track’s International City West Coast Premiere is a bit all over the place and director Brian Shnipper can’t quite figure out how to make it all mesh.

Supporting characters like dumb blonde waitress Norma (Alyssa Corella) and to a somewhat lesser extent Bodine’s pair of CBS execs show up straight out of sitcomland, while backstage moments spent with the increasingly at-each-others’-throats Lucille and Desi get a more realistic, grounded treatment, and taken as a whole, these two halves remain at odds with each other.

On the plus side, there’s a nifty sequence in which Lucille insists a scene be rewritten because, unlike in radio, the audience doesn’t need to be told what’s happening because they can see it with their own eyes, and another in which Bob and Maddie count the laughs at an I Love Lucy taping, each studio audience laugh timed perfectly to match the two writers’ snappy patter.

It helps too that Odsess-Rubin and Brown have terrific chemistry together, that Sorenson reveals the tough broad behind Lucille’s wacky TV persona, that Bill Mendieta has Desi/Ricky down pat from several years of playing them in I Love Lucy: Live On Stage, that Bodine creates four distinctive characters (including one coincidentally named Hunter), and that Corella manages to charm despite Norma’s over-the-top dumbness.

Mark Mendelson’s set transforms seamlessly from an L.A. cafe to a Hollywood soundstage to Lucy’s dressing room to Maddie and Bob’s office, and Donna Ruzika lights it with professional flair as she does Kim DeShazo’s 1950s costumes, Patty Briles’ period props, and Andy Conde’s not-so-great wigs.

The Laugh Track is produced by caryn desai. John H. Freeland, Jr. is production stage manager and Zachary Garabedian is assistant stage manager.

I was hoping to love The Laugh Track. It’s got Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in it, Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh most definitely deserve a biographical stage salute, and much of it is quite entertaining. I just wish more of it had worked the way I’d wished.

International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Through November 22. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30. Sundays at 2:00.
www.InternationalCityTheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
November 6, 2026
Photo: Denis Nigos

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