Review: Two Infamous Lawyers Go Head-to-Head in a Hilarious Cellino V. Barnes

See if you can finish the jingle: “Cellino and Barnes, injury attorneys…” Many locals can name that tune, as it was played on radios and televisions in the tristate area for nearly 30 years. But even if you can’t remember the phone number at the end, Cellino V. Barnes, presented by Mix and Match Productions at Asylum NYC, will have you laughing and singing along by the end.

For those unfamiliar with the lore, Cellino and Barnes were two lawyers in upstate New York who made their mark on the region by being the first attorneys to advertise. Their famous jingle helped create an injury-law-firm empire, with branches all over the state and even on the West coast. The play begins with their fateful meeting, when Barnes comes in for an interview at Cellino’s father’s law firm and the two decide to strike out on their own.

The show quickly establishes the similarities in their characters: Cellino (Eric William Morris) is a fast-talking lout with daddy issues and no ethics. Barnes (Noah Weisberg) is a fast-talking lout with slightly higher ethics (though not high enough that he stops Cellino from running a loan-shark scheme on their clients). It’s their differences, though, that make them perfect partners: Cellino has big ideas he can’t execute, and Barnes has the work ethic to make those ideas come to life. And just like any partnership destined to implode, it’s these similarities and differences that will eventually fuel their demise.

Morris and Weisberg are in top form here, playing off each other in ways that elevate Mike B. Breen’s and David Rafailedes’s strong writing. Morris’s outsize performance showcases Cellino’s outlandish behavior, including a memorable sequence where he literally belches up the Cellino and Barnes jingle, flooded in a pool of light from the heavens as if he is Cronus vomiting up his own children. Weisberg’s Barnes takes what could be a straight-man role and gives him a quirky sensibility that gets him just as many laughs as Morris. At a lean 75 minutes and with speed-talking fast enough to rival Mrs. Maisel, the jokes fly by so quickly that it hardly matters if they don’t land — but nearly all of them do.

Scenery and props by Riw Rakkulchon, sound design by UptownWorks, and lighting design by Aiden Bezark come together seamlessly to make the show even funnier. Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse’s direction utilizes the single set and relatively few props as much as possible, adding a hilarious layer of physical comedy that plays out in unexpected ways.

As the years pass, the bond between the duo begins to splinter and the petty grievances stack up higher and higher. Despite becoming incredibly successful and making millions of dollars a month at their height, the two men let absurd disagreements come between them. The actual ending of Cellino and Barnes’s story is a downer — after breaking the company apart, they never reconciled, and Barnes died in a tragic plane crash in 2020. The play wisely chooses to take the story in a different direction, suggesting that the love these bros had for each other continued even as their feud raged on. This thankfully keeps the proceedings from getting too dark.

The play ends with a full-circle emotional moment, providing closure for the audience that similar comedies don’t always have. Cellino V. Barnes could be a riff on the same one-note joke, but instead, it takes the characters through enough of an arc that a larger idea emerges: these men would not have gotten so mired in many of these trivial issues if they didn’t deeply care about each other. This isn’t exactly a life-changing insight, but it does create a satisfying ending, elevating Cellino V. Barnes above comedies that fall flat by the end. Whether you’ve heard the jingle a million times or have no idea what the title means, Cellino V. Barnes is a great time for all.