In the Off Broadway show 'Cellino v. Barnes' the rise and fall of the personal injury legal duo is mined for its comedic potential.
If you’ve lived in New York State for any amount of time since the late ‘90s, the Cellino & Barnes jingle (“Injury attorneys, 800-888-888”) is probably burned into your brain. The law firm it advertised, helmed by Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes, formally dissolved in 2020 amidst charges of nepotism, unethical lending practices, and disciplinary investigations. In Cellino v. Barnes, a two-man play written by Mike B. Breen and David Rafailedes, the vagaries of reality are mined for their comedic potential.
We first meet the two lawyers during their salad days in Buffalo, New York. Barnes, fresh out of law school, is looking for work; Cellino, a daddy’s boy, is floundering at his father’s firm because he doesn’t like to follow the rules. This streak of anti-authority becomes central to their bond. They’re both hungry to make names for themselves as injury attorneys and shake up the staid chambers of the legal profession, even if it means breaking a few sacred oaths along the way.
Fueled by avarice and unconventional advertising tactics, their eponymous firm takes off when they stumble upon that legendary jingle like two chumps winning on the first spin at a roulette table. What follows is a humorous, at times lighthearted, jaunt through nearly 30 years of their legal partnership, all told in dialogue between the two men.
The audience has the advantage of knowing where this friendship is headed, which the writers capitalize on, often to great effect. In an early scene where the professional partnership is cemented, Cellino warns: “To protect my own ego, I’ll destroy you, me and everyone around us if I feel even slightly disrespected.” Without skipping a beat, Barnes replies: “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Once the firm has its first taste of multimillion-dollar settlements, Cellino pitches his plan to offer loans to clients on settlements that have yet to be paid out—loan sharking, in other words. Barnes weighs his options with a whiff of disapproval. “Well you leave me no choice,” he says, “I’m going to have to turn a blind eye.” (The New York State Appellate Grievance Committee did not, suspending the real Cellino for six months for those unauthorized loans and censuring Barnes.)
At its heart, Cellino v. Barnes exposes the animalistic instincts of two men whose lust for money and corporate expansion seems to have no end. The play follows this thread to its logical conclusion when Barnes gives a PowerPoint presentation on launching Cellino & Barnes branded hospitals. “I figure why be the ambulance chasers when you can be the ambulance?”
Despite their unscrupulous ambitions, the characters of Cellino and Barnes remain strangely likable, even relatable. Perhaps because what’s at stake in this show is not the success of their firm but the friendship of two men who built an empire based on their charismatic alliance.
It’s fitting that the play was written by two friends. Mike Breen and David Rafailedes met while doing improv in New York City. On a visit home to Buffalo in 2017, the Cellino and Barnes split was all anyone could talk about, Breen tells Observer. He asked Rafailedes if he was interested in writing a play with him and the idea for Cellino v. Barnes was born.
“It was exciting from the get go,” Rafailedes tells Observer. “It was like, ‘Oh, I can see a lot of fun we can have with this story.’” He compares it to the break up of a celebrity couple—only with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, for example, you have a connection to their movies or music. “With these two, it was like, ‘Why am I invested in this? It’s just two guys on a billboard with a jingle.’”
A previous staging of the show that I saw last summer in a former office space donated by the nonprofit Chashama was more of a DIY affair, which had a certain charm to it. The writers oversaw every aspect of the show (including pasting on Barnes’ bald cap) and played Cellino and Barnes themselves. Technical difficulties—a missed cue for a phone ringing, an actor tripping on a cord and overturning a lamp—required quick ad-libs and garnered more laughs, adding to the play’s homespun appeal. In Rafailedes’ words, it was “more of a comedy special” than what now “feels like a proper show.”
In its latest incarnation at AsylumNYC, Cellino v. Barnes has higher production values, and a new cast and crew. It gains sparkle and theatricality, though it loses something along the way. Actors Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg (Cellino and Barnes, respectively) have the stage presence of Broadway professionals, and when they sing that Cellino & Barnes jingle it’s one of the play’s funniest moments. But the acting borders on the edge of cheesiness at times and some of the more farcical elements ring hollow. When Cellino shirks his responsibilities at the firm by claiming he’s been moonlighting on his daughter’s hockey team, which requires “six-hours of prosthetic makeup to make me a believable little girl,” the joke falls flat.
Cellino v. Barnes is a nostalgic tribute of sorts to a pop culture duo that can never be reunited. (Cellino and Barnes started separate firms in 2020 and Barnes died shortly thereafter when a small plane he was piloting crashed.) But on the stage, their friendship survives. There they remain the Cellino and Barnes they started out as—just two guys and a rolodex against the world.
Cellino V. Barnes | 80 mins. No intermission. | Asylum NYC | 123 E. 24th Street | 212-203-5435 | Buy Tickets Here
