Press & Reviews

Pitching Penguins - now through March 16th
Victory Gardens Greenhouse
Click here for tickets

REVIEW: Recommended by ChicagoCritic.com 

Pitching Penguins is Strictly for Laughs
review by Randy Hardwick

Chicago PR execs Michael Rosenbaum and David Brimm have teamed up to turn their long years of frustration working in public relations into a hilarious new comedy that is now in its world premiere at Victory Gardens Greenhouse. The result of their efforts is Pitching Penguins, a zany office send-up set in a mid-sized Chicago public relations firm. The staff at the firm are overblown caricatures of the real life workplace, but there is just enough truth in the stereotypes to tickle the funny bone of anyone who has ever worked in advertising or in any other office for that matter. There’s Bud Brooks (Larry Carpenter), the overly zealous boss and his idiot heir-apparent son Billy (Scott Cupper). There’s the talented, hard working female exec Sue (Julie Cowden) whose never-onstage boss Jeremy takes credit for all her work. There’s the talented wiz Bob Morrison (Thom Goodwin) who should be next in line to run the place but isn’t and the overly caffeinated young exec Stephanie Ellis (Jules Lambert) who is determined to climb the ladder no matter what sorry product she is given to work with.

There are a number of sorry products in the show, too – several of them from the playwrights’ collective real-life experience. The worst of the collection is the working for the Penguin Council to convince the public that penguin is the new white meat…and black meat. Hence the title Pitching Penguins. As the pressure to regain their status as the town’s number one agency mounts, the loser products just keep coming out of the woodwork. Billy’s dad assigns him the most important presentation, regaining the combination cellphone/microwave account whose departure a year earlier has thrust the agency into the number two slot. Billy’s mock French elegant presentation, presented in pantomime, is the side-splitting high point of the evening.

Director Karin Shook keeps the pace rapid and the performers clearly enjoy the exaggerated nature of the characters they play. The structure of Pitching Penguins is a series of ridiculous products and disastrous public relations stunts. That’s the whole bit – a collection of gags and nothing more – but the material is funny and entertaining in spite of its simplistic and overblown nature. Pitching Penguins won’t win any awards, but it will make you laugh and that’s its raison d’être.

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REVIEW: Windy City Times
review by Mary Shen Barnidge

What makes corporate offices the perfect settings for serial narratives—e.g. comic strips, television comedies—is that small crises may arise but, ultimately, inertia proves to be its own reward for employees lulled by the nostalgic promise of a “steady job.” In recent years, however, the face of American industry has undergone a revolution, and this superficially lightweight play may prove, in retrospect, to be the vanguard for official acknowledgment of a change in workplace dynamics.

Our arena is the high-powered world of Brooks and Reilly Public Relations. To be sure, Bud Brooks, whose reputation rests on his uncanny ability to make lemonade—and lettuce—from lemons, has his blind spots: one is the chronically AWOL assistant who steals credit for his subordinates' successes. The other is his own son, Billy, who stands to inherit the company despite having the IQ of a golf ball. This leaves the capable Bob, the hard-working Susan and the ambitious Stephanie to do the grunt work of promoting such anomalies as remote-control gas pumps, taser-equipped tableware ( for dieters ) , microwave cell phones and barbecued penguin wings.

Authors Michael Rosenbaum and David Brimm could have been satisfied with just venting—did I mention that they are both, themselves, survivors of the advertising wars, or that the properties mentioned in the text are not fictitious?—and much of Pitching Penguins is standard sitcom fare: annoyingly goofy characters, cutesy catch phrases in heavy rotation, reliable sight gags ( can you go wrong with a pretty girl in a penguin costume? ) and two sympathetic heroes who manage to stay above the mayhem. But where most plots in this genre would fizzle to a stop with a facile tomorrow-is-another-day shrug, or, alternatively, take a dark turn into Glengarry Glen Ross territory, this one concludes with a resolution so logical and—more important—reflective of current trends in business practices that you wonder why playwrights have not invoked it sooner.

Director Karin Shook keeps hijinks forthcoming and the pace brisk. The characterizations vary in their degree of exaggeration ( though Thom Goodwin's poker-faced delivery of the line “I've never seen anybody with so many hidden talents” should be taped for instructional purposes ) , but each persona displays the irrevocable conviction we recognize from our own experiences amid similar eccentrics to be found in every community. Once the performers fine-tune the rhythms inherent in their material, its documentary value should become evident.
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Pitching Penguins - now through March 16th
Victory Gardens Greenhouse
Click here for tickets