Theater review: ‘The Wonder Bread Years’ at McDavid Studio

— Unlike a can of Manwich, one-person shows that revel in nostalgia for mid-century Americana — or as your Boomer parents/grandparents might say, “the good old days” — don’t have a long shelf life. Certainly not as Gen-Xers and Millennials increasingly wonder what could have been so great about those days of yore in which there was way more inequality where civil rights for all Americans is concerned.

But Pat Hazell doesn’t attempt to extoll the virtues of growing up in Minnesota in a Time Before 8-Track tapes. With his show The Wonder Bread Years, brought here by Performing Arts Fort Worth and running through Sunday at McDavid Studio, Hazell uses toys, food products and other items to fondly remember that era to which everyone older than 20 can relate: being a kid.

For Hazell, who was an original writer for Seinfeld, that includes cereal boxes on which the word “sugar” was proudly displayed in colorfully large fonts, Toughskin jeans ordered from a Sears catalog, bizarre Halloween candy that could double as bathtub putty, those weird squeezable plastic coin purses grandfather was always giving out, and various household items that mom would cut a head-hole in and drape over you in lieu of a rain coat (such as garbage bags and a Twister board).

“When I was a kid we were the remote,” he says about a time before remote controls, when dad would have you sit by the TV and change the channel — sometimes with pliers because the knob had fallen off.

The show is sort of a stand-up comedy Show and Tell. He actually has a section about that Friday secondary school ritual, but the entire show is him doing those actions of showing and telling—hilariously.

The audience, which was admittedly over a certain age on Wednesday night, ate it up with plenty of laughter and recognition. Hazell, always affable and engaging, uses harmless audience interaction — one of the charms of the show.

The funniest bit, which he later backs up with a slide show, is about Halloween costumes, which were recycled year and year and alternated with his siblings. The army soldier, the witch and, yes, Colonel Sanders with the Harland Sanders mask given out at Kentucky Fried Chicken with the deep-fried-chicken-parts bucket serving as candy container.

Yes, The Wonder Bread Years might not connect with younger generations who have never seen a Slinky commercial, carried a Scotch plaid lunchbox with matching Thermos to school, or played with those Lawn Jarts that we would now plaster with warnings of injury or death. But as he implores audiences to celebrate their common denominators rather than differences, it’s hard not to play “remember when” and smile.

We can all, as he says, “unlock the sense of wonder.”

This story was originally published April 28, 2016 at 12:02 PM with the headline "Theater review: ‘The Wonder Bread Years’ at McDavid Studio."