SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

GRADE: A+
The best improv show in the festival.- BD

Better Than Advertised
Baby Wants Candy steal the whole damn festival
By Bill Davis

Wow, was that really as good as I think it was?

On top of big laughs, Baby Wants Candy got big applause throughout their set last Saturday night at the American Theater, the kind of applause other shows only see at the end.

Yep, the best improv of the Piccolo festival was delivered on Baby Wants Candy’s opening night, when BWC presented a never-before-seen musical, “Eating Popcorn in Charleston,” the title coming from the audience.

Every song and every break got applause at first, and then applause started breaking up the show mid-scene.

“Eating Popcorn” eventually revolved around the women of Charleston lamenting over the absence of men, an evil witch driving the men off with breadcrumbs (the only loose end left untied), and a haunted microwave. Like all good comedies, it ended with a marriage of sorts, and everyone paired up with their rightful partner.

Throughout, it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the seven actors on stage or the audience.

Where there is a desperate seriousness to the improv sets of Second City’s shows (“Oh, god, please let the director like me and tell the producer so I can get on mainstage where a Saturday Night Live scout can see me”), silliness ruled the day with BWC.

Al Samuels and Stuart Ranson performed as women, as they are wont to do, and fanned themselves to get over the oppressive heat. While they couldn’t have played more hackneyed characters, the strength of the overall cast saved the weak choice.

In one funny exchange, Samuels explained why he kept fanning himself with four fingers by saying, as he lifted his other hand, “Because I like to keep my real fan new.” He got a big round of mid-scene applause for the line, “One crazy Charleston woman is worth three Savannah women.”

Jack McBrayer (Scheer and McBrayer, Late Night with Conan O’Brien) played a sweetly stupid Midwesterner with new-car smell who is obsessed with telling everyone how rich he is (“This shirt is Perry Ellis.”) trying to woo the two men-less women.

As it was two years ago, so it shall be again in 2005, with Nicole Parker being the best singer in the cast. So much funnier than she is on MadTV, Parker teamed with Kevin Fleming — “So what we’ve got here is a stinky Dutch oven?” — as the struggling newlyweds whose microwave is haunted by the ghost of a witch that comes to inhabit Niki Lindgren.

Lindgren was hysterical contorting her body as the haint pushed through her skin. The guys backstage (and you know it wasn’t Parker) helped out by making fart noises every time she was wracked with a supernatural fit.

Tim Chidester was good with the “make’em ups” all night long, picking up on the mistakes of others and incorporating them into the storyline almost as adroitly as Parker, who brought the group back more than once from the brink.

At the end of the night, Samuels invited the audience to come back for future shows, pointing out there are other good improv shows in the festival but that Baby Wants Candy’s is the best. He was right on both counts.