FROM FARCE TO PHO

posted by James Reel

Is it Thursday already? That means I’m smudging a couple of pages of the latest Tucson Weekly. Only one theater review this time:

I recently heard someone dismiss Ray Cooney's farce _Funny Money_ as _Run for Your Wife 4_. In other words, Cooney, Britain's leading farceur, has stitched _Funny Money_ together according to exactly the same pattern he has successfully employed in _Run for Your Wife_ and its actual sequel, _Caught in the Net_, not to mention just about every other play he has written: That is, some entirely unremarkable Englishman gets caught up in some extraordinary circumstance of his own devising, traps himself and everyone around him in a cascade of little lies and mistaken identities, and throws around some sexual innuendo that's supposed to be titillating but really wouldn't even offend the Queen Mother. We've seen all of this before, certainly at Live Theatre Workshop, which has produced _Run for Your Wife_ and _Caught in the Net_ in recent seasons, and is now lavishing its comic resources on _Funny Money_.

Alas, I wasn’t as amused as the theater would have liked, and you can find out why here. Then move along to the Chow section, and see me abuse the liberty of the anecdotal lede:

A few years ago, I'd visit Vietnam every week--when it had a small outpost on Grant Road. It was the home of a Vietnamese man I had volunteered to tutor in English, helping him out with his Pima Community College assignments (which, by the way, were nearly spotless in grammar, usage and penmanship before I arrived). He, his wife, their kids and a grandfather were among the Vietnamese refugees who had resettled here around 1990 or so. The father of the household had been a civil engineer in Saigon, and an officer in the South Vietnamese army, which meant trouble once the North took over. In Tucson, he cleaned up other people's yards. His wife had owned a fashionable dress shop or two in Saigon; here, she sewed uniforms for the state-prison system. The kids were apparently doing great in high school and at the UA; the grandfather was less adaptable, but had transformed the front yard of their rented house into a fine vegetable garden. Every Sunday morning upon my arrival, the exceptionally hospitable family would ply me with a series of little Vietnamese dishes, sometimes involving fish balls, many of them employing a light fish sauce. I didn't charge for my tutoring services, but the food was more than ample compensation. It kept coming, morsel by morsel, until I had the willpower to leave one last bit on the plate, the polite Asian signal that I'd had enough. The portions are much larger at Saigon Phö, a restaurant that opened last spring in the new part of the Main Gate Square complex on the northwest corner of Park Avenue and University Boulevard. The restaurant doesn't face either of those streets; it's accessible through a passageway leading from University to a back parking lot. Perhaps because it's hidden away, few of the restaurant's 40 seats have been filled on any of my visits over the past few months, including dinner time on a recent Friday night.

Yes, this does eventually become a restaurant review, and you can find the part about the food here.