Scenes
From the Del Close Marathon
Location, Location, Location
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Improv’s roots are in Chicago and New York, going back to the 1950s,
with Los Angeles coming along later as improv comedians migrated into
television and film. The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, formed in
Chicago and transplanted to New York in 1999, has produced performers
who have gone on to film and television work in Los Angeles,
particularly on “Mad TV.” UCB just recently opened another theater in
Los Angeles, transplanting some performers and shows to the West Coast.
In
the Del Close Marathon, named for Chicago’s guru of improv who trained
the original four UCB members, several Chicago groups came east to
perform. And “Chicago Style,” a combination of Chicago transplants to
New York including Peter Gwinn, who had a great show the day before with
Baby Wants Candy, expertly tied together a running story comprised of
different groups of characters in different settings. The group took
detours at points, playing with Gwinn overreacting to certain actions,
and commenting on sitting down to dinner on four chairs all facing in
the same direction. Of course, one performance isn’t enough of an
example of the style coming from a city, but it could be said that the
marathon allows New Yorkers to see what’s coming from Chicago more
easily, and with UCB extending its reach, maybe what’s happening in
different cities will cross-pollinate and contribute to further
evolution.
Paul
Scheer stood out in two afternoon shows, with Owen Burke and Chad Carter
in “Bruckheimer,” and with Jack McBrayer in the two-man show
Scheer-McBrayer. Scheer hit a stride as a neighbor to Carter and Burke
as father and son who keeps popping in as the other two tried to work
out some issues between them. The neighbor prematurely deems the father
a racist and as Carter cries after telling them he’d salvaged parts of
the car in which the mother had a fatal accident, “My tragedy is your
hobby.”
With
McBrayer, Scheer found and escalated an absurdity in jobs as air traffic
controllers whose bickering quickly causes problems for planes in the
air. The duo discovered this as the names of airlines they controlled
became more and more outlandish. The laughs Scheer got ratified his
choices in both shows.
Stand Outs
Saturday, July
23, 2005
Baby
Wants Candy proved to be a highlight of the Marathon with its
all-improvised musical taken solely from an audience suggestion for the
title, which turned out to be “Little Hitler’s Dreamworld.” From this
alone, the group which included Peter Gwinn, Bob Dassie, Jack McBrayer
and Craig Cackowski, delivered a performance so good it seemed like it
was already written as a sketch.
They
constructed a clear plot in which Hitler (played by McBrayer) started
out as a good-natured, simple young orphan who is gradually transformed
by the head of the orphanage and others into what he becomes. With a
piano player backing them, the group invented musical numbers like one
in which the orphanage head, played by Gwinn, convinces young Hitler the
only ice cream should be vanilla. Others in the troupe fell quickly into
roles like Eva Braun and a duo of a Jew and a gay man trying to escape
from a concentration camp. Dark material like this could easily have
fallen flat but the group put it across with enough panache and
underlying sarcasm, coupled with parody of musicals themselves, that it
worked.
Respecto Montalban scored with unlikely elements woven together --
stories on separate tracks of a serial killer motivated by a hatred of
polka (Rob Riggle of Saturday Night Live), the killer’s crazy father
(Paul Scheer of Best Week Ever) and the one who trains the killer to be
a stealthy assassin (Jackie Clarke), along with the tale of an aspiring
polka dancer who will become a target for the killer. Riggle can deploy
a Sam Kinison-like scream or screech from beyond the grave, which he
doesn’t get to do very often on SNL, but here it was perfect for raging,
“POLKA!” before he starts simulating breaking necks.
In
early evening Saturday, the Upright Citizens Brigade itself (Matt Walsh,
Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Amy Poehler) did a performance with a lot
of “meta” twists and turns. UCB, as in its regular Sunday night Asscat
shows, often uses monologues between scenes, and in this show they went
meta as Walsh’s criticism of Roberts’ monologue as boring forced a group
meeting -- not once but twice -- in which they ended up riffing on bits
they had just performed.
Naked
Babies -- Brian Huskey, Seth Morris and Rob Corddry of “The Daily Show,”
ended up relying on Corddry’s mugging, not that that’s a bad thing
though, because he uses that well. But the stories they wove -- a guy
taking a test drive kidnapping the salesman with him for days, and three
friends lost in the woods having to huddle for warmth -- did not crackle
with intensity at quite the same level as Respecto did later in the
night.
Going Meta
Friday July 22, 2005
Improv can never be perfect. Even when it’s great or even when it’s
genius, mistakes are made. In the first night of the 7th
annual Del Close Marathon at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and
the adjunct Abington Theater, some groups and combinations found the
humor in the reactions to mistakes.
“The
Sunshine Gang,” featuring Chad Carter, Chris Gethard, Brian Huskey,
Billy Merritt and Bobby Curious, performs its improv all in the context
of a WPA-sponsored performance group touring Depression-era work camps
in 1934. Some scenes suffered from repetition, but the Gang pulled out
of this by stepping out of the scene, remarking on the setting of the
back of a bakery, and turning the imaginary scenery around to continue
the scene from the front of the bakery. One member blurts out “heighten
it,” meaning of course raising the stakes of the scene … and we learn
the bakery has caught fire -- and Huskey screams in exaggerated terror.
The Gang turned what’s sometimes called “meta” -- commenting on the
Harold improv format within a performance -- into its salvation.
Later, Merritt, with two members of the recently disbanded troupe, The
Swarm, made a post-farewell farewell in the marathon. Merritt, with
Michael Delaney, turned the Harold into a test of Delaney’s will that
the audience could pick up on as Merritt played hopelessly dumb, not
knowing what an extension cord is in a scene involving electrical
repair. Merritt threw in a lot of odd and dark non-sequiturs like a
character named Lindsey Buckingham who wasn’t the actual Fleetwood Mac
singer, and a soup of white blood cells being served in a restaurant.
Merritt’s monkey wrenches ended up giving the performance an Abbott &
Costello-like tone, with Merritt clearly Costello to Delaney’s Abbott.
In
The Shoves’ set at the Abington theater, Sarah Burns stood out even more
than usual playing a drunk whose drunkenness sent her not reeling but
into a free-floating insanity in which her executive character appoints
someone as “President of My Mind” and mercilessly keeps her secretary on
pins and needles with commands like “Put something in my hand so I don’t
make it into a fist.”
Monkeydick managed to walk another difficult line of taking on a
previously seen character from TV or movies -- in this case the odd
choice of Tim Conway’s Dorf character -- and making it work by keeping
it consistent with the warped world they created in their performance.
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