SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

Well, thank god that’s over.

Last night’s two back-to-back productions of our collaborative short play showcase at PURE Theatre, A Perfect Ten, was fun and all, but I must have been insane to schedule it for the middle of Spoleto’s second week. What was I thinking? If you noticed that my daily blogging updates have dipped in recent days, it’s because I was acting in a short play written and directed by PURE ensemble member David Mandel called “Type Against Type,” as well as directing my own short play, “Eight Grand,” which involves a menacing Mexican immigrant, a loquatious loan shark, a hapless poker player, an Xbox, a partly paid-off Chevy Tahoe, a semi truck with a false bottom, date rape drugs, and a pizza. (If I can figure out how to post a PDF of the script here, I will.)

Spoletoblog’s Dan Conover came by the 9pm show, which was very cool of him, and he writes about it on today’s blog. Like Dan, I’d love to see us put together some more of these types of things at PURE’s excellent little black box theatre (in the Cigar Factory at East Bay and Columbus) in the future. But not necessarily during the middle of Spoleto again.

If you haven’t yet been to see a play at PURE Theatre, you don’t know what you’re missing Every local theatre company has its strengths; PURE’s lies in great acting, a versatile, intimate space, and cutting-edge, contemporary scripts that are both entertaining and provocative. They’ll be producing David Mamet’s classic play about small-time crookery, American Buffalo, this July. Mark your calendars, because you want to catch it. Trust me.

Here’s a photo of PURE ensemble members R.W. “Smitty” Smith and David Mandel rehearsing “Eight Grand” before last night’s performance. These guys rock.

I had no idea going into Tuesday night’s Scheer and McBrayer show that Paul Scheer is the kinda-strange-looking, gap-toothed guy who makes pithy comments on any of VH1’s endless “I Love The …” and “Best Week Ever” shows. So it would be safe to say that when I realized this, I did a bit of inner groaning (never thought he was one of the funniest commentators). However, I was swiftly proven wrong once he and Jack McBrayer launched into their almost nonstop-hilarious 45-minute improv set at the American Theatre. Scheer’s portrayals of numerous characters in one skit (including a wonderfully-accented Kelly Clarkson imitation) were totally unexpected and quite a treat. Like many of today’s young comedians, they’ve figured out that a little office humor goes a long way; McBrayer’s portrayal of your typical 20-something “dude” at the office and Scheer’s 40-something guy realizing he’s wasting his life away (trust me, it was funny) earned enthusiastic (and empathetic?) claps from the audience. These two make a great comedy team, with McBrayer’s Everyguy adorableness providing a perfect foil for Scheer’s more eccentric vibe. Two thumbs up, see them before you make an ass out of yourself trying to figure out how you know Scheer (”Hey, did you work at the Dairy Queen in Fayetteville or somethin’? I SWEAR I’ve seen you before…”)

Bill Davis and I had words about his review of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, in which he panned their Thurs., June 2 show. I went to see the Trachtenburgs on Saturday afternoon, and despite a few technical glitches that seemed to plague them throughout their run at the festival, I was highly amused and entertained the whole time. Jason, the dad, was effortlessly funny and cute in his nebbishness, and Rachel, the 11-year-old drummer/daughter, ably handled the drums AND singing harmony in her tiny child’s voice. The slides were funny and the stories Jason told added that extra zing to the proceedings. I’ll definitely be seeing the Trachtenburgs again the next time they come through town, technical problems be damned!

–Sara Miller

Brandy Sullivan, one of The Have Nots! at the American Theater running that group’s Piccolo Fringe, tells me they’ve just added a show to Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet. The additional show is this Thursday, June 9 at 5pm. Tickets are $15 and there’s no late seating. Tix can be bought at the American Theater 45 minutes prior to the show.

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.

If you’re looking to find the funny in this year’s festival, you’ve got a cornucopia of options. Spoleto’s Solo Turns series has already showcased two of the most entertaining monologuists I’ve seen in years: Mike Daisey (The Ugly American) and Hazelle Goodman (On Edge). But Spoleto’s stuff tends to be too highbrow to really bust a gut over (those two were happy exceptions); all the real laughs come from the direction of Piccolo Spoleto’s several theatre series. And among those, the heavyweights are Second City, back this year for at least their seventh or eighth consecutive Piccolo appearance, and the new kids on the block: Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe at the American Theater, which features not just hometown faves The Have Nots! (who produce the whole shebang) but some of the biggest hitters from around the country, too, including Jack McBrayer, Chicago-based musical-theatre improv masters Baby Wants Candy, and New York improvisers Upright Citizens Brigade.

If Second City is Chicago’s claim to national comedy fame, then UCB is New York’s. I thought it would be interesting to catch the two group’s performances in a single afternoon and do a little compare/contrast. Second City was first up, over at Physicians Auditorium. The six-person tourco did a little improvising, but the bulk of the two-hour show featured prepared, rehearsed skits, some of which had the matinee audience in hysterics, others of which landed with a dull thud (of these, one particularly comes to mind: a skit in which God awakens from a binge drunk begun on his post-Creation “day of rest” to find Jesus was trapped on Earth for 33 years without any way to get back home to heaven, stalling for time by “making shit up,” finally killing and resurrecting himself out of desperation; I was laughing, but I sounded like a lunatic in a mausoleum). Other efforts met with more success; a bit where a male character blew into the foot of a limp female character until she slowly stiffened to become a blow-up sex doll, mouth open in an “O” and arms outstretched, was one of the afternoon’s biggest, and simplest, hits. But in the second half they tanked with an interminable improvised skit about a public radio program on spiders, which bored for nearly 15 minutes. The Second Citiers also seemed to have low energy on Friday; maybe it was the matinee audience, which was surely not in the same spirits as the group’s usual 9pm crowds, who are half drunk to begin with.

An hour later, at the American Theater, I caught a 6pm show from Upright Citizens Brigade. (I noticed this was the first Piccolo Fringe show I’d been to this year that wasn’t sold out; the place was about three-quarters full. Though I did hear that the Have Nots! show following it had been sold out all day.)

The first half of UCB’s show was a 30-minute sketch about a Christian Youth Camp meeting hosted by two typically cheeseball reformed and ‘born-again’ former sinners, who try to relate to the youthful Christians by talking ‘hip’ and using cornball catchphrases like ‘Christicanity.’ One of the speakers was, of course, the former lead singer of the Buggles, who wrote the very first MTV music video tune “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It was sidesplitting, eye-wiping stuff, top professional grade. (Although I can guarantee that if they performed that skit at every show, angry letters would be pouring in to the Piccolo office and local op/ed pages; they came down vastly harder on Christian types than even Second City had in their skit.)

The second half of UCB’s intermissionless 60-minute show was pure long-form improv — but what improvising this was. (A citywide weed drought had four friends attacking a fifth friend who arrived with a tiny bud; seeing there wasn’t enough to go around, they drilled a hole in his head and, since he was already high, smoked him. Naturally they inhaled some of his memories, too. “Man, I didn’t realize what a depressing life he’s had.” “That’s what I call a paper-thin optimism.”)

Upshot: the Second City gang, who are no slouches, couldn’t touch what the UCB guys were pulling off. Not yesterday, anyway.

Gardner Guess, Charleston’s biggest fan of comedy, is back on the blog today. (You’ve seen Gardner bagging groceries at Harris Teeter downtown and tromping around town in his trademark floppy hat.) Here’s what he had to say about what he’s seen at the fringe and in Piccolo.

Thursday, June 2

1. Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, 7 p.m. American Theater
“I really liked it … it was a rollercoaster of pure fun … A+”
(In fairness, it should be noted that Gardner, during a Q&A with the family/band, asked them how long they’d been together.)

2. The Best of National No Shame Theatre, 9:30 p.m., Theatre 220
“I really thought they were really amazing … A+ … I’ve liked just about everything I’ve seen this year.”
( In fairness, it should be noted Gradner dozed off several times during the show; something Dottie Ashley would never do.)

Sunday, May 29

1. Second City, 6 p.m., Physicians Auditorium
“I loved it, they were so awesome and everyone of them was so talented; it was really cool and very funny … I’m glad you sent me to it … A+.”

Saturday, May 28

1. Man 1, Bank 0, 5:30 p.m., American Theater
“What an amazing story … that never could have happened to me; I would never have been able to [cash a bank check for $90,000] … A+.”

2. Upright Citizens Brigade, 9 p.m., American Theater
“Now they were really funny, I almost wet my pants they were so funny; like everything I’ve seen this year they were so good … A+.”

Last Friday, I’d found myself in the American Theater for Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet. (See Jennifer Corley’s review of TNT also on this blog). I’d seen both of Dov Weinstein’s previous shows, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, at Piccolo in 2002 and ‘03, and so I was quite looking forward to seeing his take on Hamlet. From the get-go, however, I noticed things were different. Instead of gathering intimately around the small table Weinstein has used as a set for previous shows, this audience was sitting in seats as they would for any show in Stars Bar. This Hamlet, it seems, is a cinematic production, not a stage production. Weinstein utilizes a set of very tiny cameras to project images of his action-figure players onto a pair of screens behind him. It’s an interesting idea, and the possibilities it opens up for the show are as vast as the opportunities filmmakers have over stage directors in telling a story. Sometimes, for example, the camera gives us a single character’s point of view (we peep, as Polonius, from behind the arras as Hamlet harangues his mother the Queen and then rushes at us with a sword). But rather than adding to the play, I felt Weinstein’s strategy backfired this time. His camera work was jerky and sometimes out of focus; it often took him a long time to set up a scene for projection; overall, the concept seemed to add yet another layer of difficulty to interpreting the play rather than enhancing its meaning.

To be or not to be a work of greatness

Overcoming some of the technical staging issues may result in a more accomplished, solid, pint-sized production of Shakespeare’s most famous play.

By Jennifer Corley

Credit must be given to creator and puppet master Dov Weinstein for doing something new to Shakespeare just when you thought everything had been done, short of using farm animals as actors (hey, there’s an idea…). His productions involve exactly what the company name is: Tiny Ninja Theater. He uses small plastic vending-machine action figures (mostly ninjas, but some others) along with his own voice to portray the works of Shakespeare. Hamlet is his newest endeavor. Clever? Yes. Entertaining? Yes. Worth $15? Yes. But “brilliant,” as some say? Umm, slow down a little.

Much of the buzz generated for Tiny Ninja Theater Presents Hamlet would have one thinking this is flawless storytelling, when it just isn’t. There’s simply no way that you can take all that is contained in Hamlet and boil it down to 50 minutes and still convey that story well. TNTPH is incredibly inventive — without actually being too gimmicky — and for that, it deserves recognition. However, it would be difficult to follow if you’re unfamiliar with the story. It’s not going to open up a whole new world to non-Shakespeare fans or make it suddenly understandable to those who have a difficult time with it. In fact, even if you are familiar with Hamlet, TNTPH still is a bit sticky.

Weinstein begins the production atop a literal black box performance space — where under an eerie red light, the flipping of his hand to either palm or back reveals Bernardo and Francisco. Action soon moves to another black box, then to a small table, then another box. The four performance areas are too spread out; Weinstein leaps around to get from one area to another when the confined energy could be more powerful if he didn’t have as far to travel. (It’s almost as if the beautiful visuals that people talk about with his productions don’t have ample time to play out in this one as they should, since he has to scoot across the stage to the next scene.)

In the past, TNT productions involved opera glasses for audiences. With Hamlet, there are two small cameras that Weinstein carries around and inserts into the scenes so that you can see the miniscule action in giant size on screens in front of you. The cameras and the images are always clever, but not always an asset. It appears that Weinstein gets distracted from his players in front of him by having to monitor the screens and make sure that the desired image is showing for the audience.

However, some of his technique is strikingly clever. Hamlet is full of lurking, and Weinstein uses the cameras to enhance that idea. In scenes where a character is lurking or spying, the camera shows us that character’s point of view. So, for instance, we see Hamlet and Gertrude through a slit, as if through a curtain, while Polonius (known as Corambis in the 1603 version Weinstein uses) hides and watches. There is another scene in which Corambis advances towards the camera with each heightened step of his anger. And after Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost, his eyesight — the image we see onscreen — becomes shaky in his hysteria. The fatal duel between Laertes and Hamlet is portrayed through two swords attached to two cameras, so that each screen shows the point of view of one of the characters as they duel. These are things that make people laugh, but it’s a laugh almost of disbelief — that such care and thought would go into such things as little plastic figurines. It’s an appreciative laugh, for sure.

There is a bizarre duality to some of these figurines, a ridiculousness yet appropriateness — Ophelia’s innocent, gargantuan eyes, Claudius’ creepily large grin (he has a large smiley-face head), Hamlet’s darkly concealed body (swathed in plastic black ninja garb) — Or maybe it’s just easy to read into it whatever you want to. Whichever the case, there is something oddly pretty about it.

Weinstein uses some witty devices in the play’s most famous bits. In the play-within-a-play scene, Weinstein hums while producing a proportionately large fake ear and lying it in front of the King and Queen, then dripping the poison into it. In his representation of the clown figure gravediggers, he shines the small red light onto his nose as he delivers the lines. And Ophelia’s suicide is a corker, too.

Maybe it’s the combined and abridged text Weinstein uses; maybe it’s that he’s often dashing round the stage; perhaps it’s that the audience simply isn’t sure where to focus their attention; maybe it’s that Weinstein himself has to shift his attention away from his ninja players to his monitors. But there’s an overall mish-mashy, hasty feeling.

Weinstein is a pretty good actor, and the voices he gives to some of the figures are so appropriate and hilarious you laugh as soon as he starts talking. But is TNTPH really any thing more than an adult playing with toys? An overgrown kid using Shakespearian dialogue instead of extemporaneous GI Joe-type talk? It’s not hard to think that, given that Weinstein romps around barefoot and in overalls, and does play for some cheap laughs like giving Laertes a lisp. But. Even if that’s true, does that really matter? TNTPH may not be “genius” or “brilliant” or any of those other liberally used words on the scene. But it is a fresh approach to Shakespeare. An actual interesting approach, not just another senseless whack at contextualizing it. So while TNTPH may not be perfect, it’s still worth a look.

The first show in Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe at the American Theater — Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet, on Friday — was sold out long before showtime, which is a good sign for that gang. On the way in Have Not! Brandy Sullivan told me that tickets for Dov’s action-figure Hamlet were moving fast, and another show in the series, Man 1, Bank 0, was “on fire.”

Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet was actually a lot different from the TNT productions I’ve seen in the past. In his Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, you stood gathered with 20 or so other people around a small table, on which Dov manipulated all the figurines and provided all the voices. He’s trained as a puppeteer, so the creative methods, props, and figures (they’re not all ninjas) he finds to tell these classic stories has always been impressive. But this Hamlet is very different. The audience is seated in the smallish Stars Theatre on tall barstool-like chairs, and Dov has a pair of projection screens behind him and tables bearing miniature sets and mobile cameras scattered across the compact stage. What once was all-analog has now gone digital. We watch almost the entire show on one of the two screen behind him as Dov manipulates the cameras to show us the story. It’s a huge difference, and I’m not altogether certain it works as well. The intent is good, but film — and this is film — is an entirely different medium from the stage. Sometimes he seemed to spend a great deal of time getting the camera positioned for the shot and scrambling about the floor, setting everything up for the scene, and the hand-held camera was often so shaky and out of focus, that it distracted from the story he was trying to tell. Technology 1, Man 0.

We sure thought Laertes’ lisp was a hoot, though.