Wisconsin's largest comedy event reached its second weekend last night with a single show. The 7:30 pm Thursday night evening was a nice warm-up for Festival's final shows. The Jazzy sound of Filthharmonic played through Next Act's theatre space as things got underway.
Ryan Lowe opened the show with stand-up. The Milwaukee-based comic's act feels like vintage Bobcat Goldthwait meets Steven Wright in a dark room with a puppet a microphone and a werewolf beard. In places the performance feels more like disjointed monologue than an actual stand-up routine which is really refreshing . . . .but rest assured that there are jokes and they are delivered and the audience really, really liked it.
The program followed through with a performance by the improv group Running With . . . Comprised of a group of young, male improv comics, the group perform a long-form bit based around the format for the late imrpov group After School Special. Taking a suggestion from the audience, the group worked through a long form high school comedy with various stock characters they'd been working with. The dynamic Tyler White, Cameron Smith, Roc Bauman, and Nevin Langhus is interesting, but it lacks the full range of improv moods that also included many of the original members of After School Special. Still--Running With…is not without its moments and there were some rather clever moments here.
The fourth evening of the festival closed-out with a performance by TIM: The Improvised Musical. The long form improv group takes a suggested title from the audience and builds a complete musical around it with music, lyrics, choreography and such. They've been around for over a year now and I've never had the opportunity to see them perform until now. Wow. If last night was any indicator, this group is taking improv to a whole different level. A group of talented improv comics is accompanied by an equally talented three-piece band including guitar, drums and synthesizer.
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Part of the fun behind an good improv act is watching truly funny people build something funny onstage that you know they'd never explicitly discussed beforehand. When that happens to result in a surprisingly tight mini-Broadway-style musical it lands somewhere in a range between extreme cleverness and brilliance. The degree to which musicians feed off improve comics feeding off musicians and the complexity of the comedy dynamic develops a richly harmonic kind of comedy with a kind of depth rarely seen in improv.
The cheesiness and campiness of a standard American musical is such a convincing parody of itself. There's something really satisfying in seeing that comedy performed with the full acknowledgment of how truly silly it is. You see a big broadway show that rolls through town at the Marcus Center and you know a tremendous amount of time and effort went into producing it. The comedy TIM reveals that you really don't need to go through all that effort . . . The cheesy, stupid, schmaltzy energy of a broadway musical can be entirely made-up on the spot. This is not to say that improvised musical comedy would be anywhere new this entertaining were it not for a group of actors and musicians that all working together in such a tightly-woven synthesis. This and the Comic Thread are my two favorite acts on the festival so far . . .
The Improvised Musical performs at ComedySprotz on 420 South 1st Street Thursday, August 16th starting at 7:30 pm. The group performs there every third Thursday of the month.
The Milwaukee Comedy Festival continues through Saturday, August 11th. For ticket reservations, visit Brownpapertickets.com.
Tonight's 7:30 pm show features Will Durst and Broadminded . . . which should be a really, really fun show and probably th highlight of the festival for anyone not already scheduled to cover opening night of Milwaukee Chamber's A Thousand Clowns for the Shepherd Express.
