When Richard Marsh, writer and star of Yippee Ki-Yay: the parody celebration of Die Hard, asked the Broadway Playhouse audience at Wednesday night’s opening if they’d seen the iconic Bruce Willis movie, almost every hand, well, shot up. The Die Hard diehards among us found much to ho-ho-ho about during this briskly paced one-man show that takes the piss out of what Marsh accurately proclaims the best Christmas movie of all time.
In 75 action-packed minutes, Marsh not only reimagines John McTiernan’s 1988 action film from a decidedly off-kilter perspective, he also takes us through his relationship with wife Jennifer from their first meeting to their wedding (performed by an officiant dressed as Hans Gruber who proclaimed it “a Nakatomi matrimony ceremony”) to becoming parents to navigating a near-breakup. Rather than feeling tacked-on, these sections of the show are by turns amusing and affecting. Marsh is quite charming and elicits genuine interest in his romantic ups and downs. It’s like a Mike Birbiglia show if Birbiglia were to weave action-movie parodies into his relationship storylines.
At its core, though, the piece is a surprisingly faithful re-creation of the movie that mines the proceedings for many hearty laughs even as Marsh, a poet turned performer, delivers the story in verse. We get all the big beats as wisecracking John McClane, barefoot and bleeding, takes on the dapper homicidal thief Hans Gruber and his henchmen–chiefly the blond-maned, deadly dance-fighting dervish Karl.
There’s the moment with the lighter in the air duct, the dead thug McClane sends down the elevator with a sign reading “Now I have a machine gun ho, ho, ho,” and all the other greatest hits up to and including Gruber’s final fall from grace. Marsh, who is British, pokes a lot of gentle fun at the late Alan Rickman for deciding to use his native accent with a few German intonations thrown in. In a nod to Rickman’s perhaps more famous turn as Professor Snape, there are plenty of Harry Potter references thrown in for good measure.
One of the reasons this monologue about an action movie works so well is that it creates a funhouse mirror image of Die Hard, which is essentially an action movie with a Bruce Willis monologue running through it.
Will John reunite with estranged wife Holly? Well, yeah, but not in quite the way fans of the movie remember it. Will Marsh resolve his own marital difficulties better than McClane ultimately did? No spoilers here on that score, but you may just leave the theater humming “Ode to Joy.”
Yippee Ki-Yay runs through December 15 at Broadway in Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Rod Penn
