Starting With a Spread

As the year rushes to a close, the openings of shows are dwindling, just as the opening of packages awaits. This past weekend was among the last big pushes, or at least the weekend that the papers tried to catch up with everything that was still up and running before year's end.

So there's a lot this week, and I'll try to pace myself.

Critics couldn't resist the food-related jokes with BUTTER at Hollywood's [Inside] the Ford. I got it right out of the way in the lead of my Times review: “Light, slight and more touching than uproarious, Elizabeth Logun's Butter is a low-impact British farce about coupling and decoupling that goes down as smoothly as, well, butter.” Back Stage West's Les Spindle, who liked the show considerably less than I, calling it “more noise and frantic activity than rhyme or reason,” saved his big guns for the closer: “Logun's synthetic concoction goes down as smoothly as a slab of chemical-loaded Parkay. One can believe it's not 'buttah.' ” The Weekly's Steven Mikulan showed admirable restraint on this front, though he wasn't a big fan of the show, either, calling it “little more than a writing exercise” and opining that “director Dave P. Moore gets consistently over-the-top performances from his cast, but doesn't orchestrate a steady level of quality for this production.” Getting endearingly specific, Mikulan dings the show for some “inexplicable slips,” such as confusing a “jumper” with a cardigan and chicken with bologna. I guess he did get around to food, after all.