What: The Odd Couple
Where: Metro Studio
When: Preview tonight, opens Friday, continues to Oct. 6
Tickets: $20 (half price for preview); ticketrocket.org
Tonight, with luck, Howie Siegel will deliver a performance of which even Lenny Bruce’s mom would approve.
Siegel — the Victoria restaurateur, former broadcaster, occasional actor and full-time bon vivant — is performing in Neil Simon’s comedy The Odd Couple. It stars Siegel as slobbish Oscar Madison and Eric Holmgren as fastidious Felix.
Interviewed at Pagliacci’s restaurant, which he owns with his brother, Siegel reminisced about his first ill-fated stab at showbiz.
In the early 1970s, he decided to try to stand-up comedy. It was Siegel’s high-school friend, Sork the Dork, who advised him to pursue such a path. “He said, ‘You’re really funny. Why don’t you be a comedian?’ ”
Taking Sork the Dork’s words to heart, Siegel immediately dropped plans to take a master’s degree in history at California State. He spent several months writing a comedy routine, which he subsequently debuted at a Sunset Strip club.
It did not go well. And then something even more terrible happened.
“I heard a shrill voice from the audience going, ‘Get off! You stink!’ ” said Siegel, speaking so forcefully restaurant patrons swivelled their heads.
Afterwards the club’s mistress-of-ceremonies told Siegel the heckler was Sally Marr, mother of legendary comic Lenny Bruce. Siegel was so devastated he abandoned his nascent comedy career and moved to Lasqueti Island to become a hippie.
Now 68, Siegel re-embraced his showbiz dreams at the age of 55 by trying his hand at stage acting in Victoria. He’s performed in more than half a dozen plays, including a 2011 production of Glengarry Glen Ross that co-starred his friend Holmgren.
The irony in The Odd Couple, the pair said, is that each is in real life the opposite of his character. Holmgren, playing neat-freak Felix, is lax on the domestic front while Siegel keeps his home and Miata spotless. “I’m a neatnik,” Siegel said. “He’s a slob.”
Added Holmgren: “Howie takes comfort in vacuuming the rehearsal hall, making sure the tables are clean, while I’m trying to mess the place up every chance I get.”
Holmgren, whose mainstay is acting, has done more drama than comedy. The comedies he’s been in have tended be farcical.
“This has been a challenge for me, because Neil Simon’s style is not big and broad and over the top,” he said.
The play is directed by Richard Stille. Siegel and Holmgren praised the cast, which includes Wes Borg, Karen Brelsford, Kirsten Van Ritzen, Morgan Cranny, Jaymes D. Goodman and Ryan Bangma.
Siegel said he’s worked extra hard memorizing his lines. He wants to avoid a repeat of his 2005 performance in George F. Walker’s Love and Anger at Langham Court Theatre.
A pre-show consumption of Red Bull, coffee and pseudo-ephedrine — combined with a lack of food — led to an onstage meltdown. Somehow Siegel forgot all his words although he’d prepared for the part.
“I would have been disqualified from the Olympics at that point,” he said. “That’s why I started learning my lines [for The Odd Couple] in February, for fear of exploding again like that. It was the worst night of my life.”