Michael Mullen shines in Jonathan
Tolins’ affectionate backstage fantasy

Michael Mullen

Jonathan Tolins built his 2013 solo play Buyer & Cellar around one of the stranger facts in contemporary celebrity lore. Barbra Streisand really does keep a basement mall under her Malibu barn: a doll shop, an antique store, a sweet shop. The setup reads like a joke waiting for a writer. Tolins turned out to be the writer, and the Victory Theatre Center has found its actor in Michael Mullen.

The play follows Alex More, a struggling gay actor in Los Angeles whose run of humiliations has landed him the strangest of day jobs. He minds the private shops of the most famous living diva, and the shops have exactly one customer. When she finally comes down to browse her own merchandise, the play stops being a riff and starts being about something. It wants to know what being seen costs a person, and what going unseen costs one. Alex needs to be noticed the way the basement shops need foot traffic. That parallel is the play’s smartest move.

Mullen carries the show on charm, and he is serious about the charm. He is funny, fast with Tolins’ jokes about the L.A. theater scene, and steady as the intimacy ratchets up. Unlike Michael Urie in the original production, he impersonates Barbra outright, and he plays her well. He catches the voice and pushes the hand gestures for laughs. He also catches the harder thing: the pleasantness that unnerves, the perfectionism passed off as warmth. Under Cate Caplin‘s direction, even the silences are occupied.

The other figures get only as much light as Alex’s story throws on them. Barry, Alex’s boyfriend, gets the sharpest comic rhythms, and Mullen slips into him with a dry timing that earns the laughs without flagging the switch. Sharon, the house manager, is broader, played with a British accent. James Brolin turns up late, mostly as a punchline. The role built Urie a career as a one-man tour de force, but it rewards anyone who can hold a room alone, and Mullen holds it. Each figure stays as thin or as full as Alex needs to be believed.

Michael Mullen

Evan Bartoletti‘s set is the evening’s one misfire. The stage is a cozy but drab sitting room: furniture, ugly framed prints, a stained-glass table lamp, a few small figurines. All of it looks bought from the Burbank Goodwill clearance bin. A play about wanting to stand in a famous woman’s glow should not leave Alex telling it from a room nobody would look at twice.

The script has limits. Celebrity worship is well-worn ground, and the play is best when it presses against its own warmth instead of sinking into it. The climax turns on the diva going cold, the one moment Alex is fully seen and then dropped, and it points toward something darker than Tolins follows. A more unsparing version of this story exists.

Tolins did not write it. He wrote the version that sends you out fond of everyone in it, Barbra included, and that is a generous choice rather than a complete one. Mullen earns every minute he asks you to spend on Alex, and the ninety minutes pass like company you did not know you wanted. By the end, the man who spent the play wanting to be seen has made you see him, which is the only proof the generous version needed.

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photo courtesy Victory Theatre

Buyer & Cellar
The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd. in Burbank
105 minutes, no intermission
ends on June 20, 2026
for tickets ($15-$51), call 818.841.5421 or visit Victory

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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