How else would a live show made by two dudes best known for creating a mouthy milkshake, cooler-than-thou French fries and a talking ball of mystery meat start the night? Playing to a sold-out crowd this past Saturday, David Willis and Dana Snyder—co-creators of the long-running Adult Swim show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force—brought the first-ever stage rendition of the show to Lakeshore Theater…well, sort of. Despite the title Aqua Teen Hunger Force Live, only about half of the 2.5-hour show (the better half we might add) was devoted to the actual cartoon. Sure it was cool to see the voices of Shake, Meatwad and Carl come to life and super cool to watch the real Meatwad critique audience members doing amateur impersonations of the character, but the best part of the show was getting to see Snyder and Willis’ live clips. In addition to showing snippets from Snyder’s serious acting gigs, which includes a one-line spot on ER (Snyder showed it three times), the pair also screened several Funny Or Die-style live action clips that were so hysterical they put Aqua Teen to shame (one of which is available in two parts: one and two. If the part where Willis asks Snyder if he’d like to change the line “Nothing a good butthole massage can’t fix” to “Nothing a good fannyport massage can’t fix” doesn’t get you, don’t even bother reading the rest of this review).

The duo also played a couple diddies like “I Sure Hope I Don’t Have To Beat Your Ass This Christmas” from their new album Have Yourself a Meaty Little Christmas, conducted a Meatwad sound-alike contest with the audience, aired clips from upcoming Aqua Teen and Squidbillies episodes and led the audience in a group kazoo rendition of “Happy Birthday” explaining, “They don’t give you shit like this at Steppenwolf. They don’t give you a kazoo and teach you how to play it. We’re making theatre history!”

Compared to Snyder and Willis’ live clips and their borderline magical audience interactions which were somehow simultaneously berating and uplifting, material from the Aqua Teen actually seemed to hold the duo back a little. We’re looking for to the day when Lakeshore hosts Dana Snyder and Dave Willis Live, without their cartoon counterparts.

Given that we’ve seen solo improv, Elizabethan improv, musical improv, Tarentino improv, Jane Austen improv, improv based around deep, dark secrets, competitive improv, drinking improv and on and on and on, a parody of the whole shebang was bound to happen. Improviser! captures it right down to lampooning the fundamentals of the art form including yes-and-ing, making bold choices, strong initiations and so forth.

But it is much more a parody of the improvising lifestyle, one that budding improvisers are going to love. In one number, three friends lament having to attend yet another one of their improvising campadre’s awful shows (this time in the ‘burbs). Ditto a scene in which a romance blossoms between a female student and her male instructor (why improvisers date other improvisers we’ll never fully know for sure). All the improvising archetypes are here. We have the middle-aged dude who creeps everybody out, the minority improviser who feels like he’s there to fill a quota, the woman who uses her sexuality to get put on a team, the parents who are there to support their kid (and wonder why they spent all that money on tuition) and so forth. If you’re an improviser, you’ll find yourself somewhere in this show, trust me.

After a run at Donny’s Skybox in October, it makes sense that this show has landed at iO, where most of the action takes place. Improviser! is actually about the iO experience, from taking level one classes all the way to auditioning and hopefully getting accepted onto a Harold team like the Del Tones. This forms the basis of the show’s ebullient finale. As the ensemble gathers for their audition, Improviser! employs an amusing gimmick that while predictable is no less joyful once it’s employed. I won’t spoil it here.

So who’s going to see this, you might wonder? Improvisers of course. While my friend (a non-improviser) enjoyed the show, he clearly felt left out of a lot of references. But given that hundreds of students come through iO’s classrooms each year, Improviser! should enjoy a successful run. Oh, and of course the parents of the ensemble will be there. Life does imitate art after all.

In the opening sketch, for example, the fuss over gay marriage is brought front and center as a male couple in the Hawkeye state frets over the doldrums of domestic life. “I want the free rings, but not the baggage they bring,” one groom laments. The solution? Marry in Iowa for wedded bliss, but cross back over the Illinois border for bachelorhood.

In other sketches, Gayco points fun at gender reassignment surgery and its impact in the workplace, Anderson Cooper’s unwillingness to come out and the Daley Machine. It also takes swipes at FOX news and its claim to be fair and balanced as three news anchors wonder if Obama is turning our nation socialist, black and gay. Is this even a parody, you may wonder. It’s a thin line at best. But the show is funny mostly because GayCo has never had trouble making fun of the LGBTQA (LMNOP) community and all its foibles. In the best sketch of the evening, the infinite number of speeches given at gay rallies gets spoofed. “We’re here to represent the super cougar sub dom lesbian community!” one woman shouts through the megaphone as anxious protesters wait in vain to hit the streets.

While the show is unabashedly queer (but still straight accessible), educational and entertaining, it’s also not perfect. Audacity aims to spoof the broken promises made by president Obama, but is missing the man himself. Racial diversity has never been a GayCo strong suit. That’s not entirely their fault of course, out improvisers of color are probably lacking. But without one, the satire is limited.

Ultimately, fences are mended in Audacity. A finale finds a same-sex couple bonding with a group of Iowa women over ham balls. Who would’ve guessed that big, meaty balls would ultimately bring straight women and gay men together? No comment.

The Audacity of Nope plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday through December 5. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at gayco.com.

The Second City e.t.c

Speaking of which, the Second City is celebrating its 50th anniversary weekend with a series of panel discussion the weekend of December 12-13. It announced the full lineup yesterday. Tickets for each panel are $25 and will be available for purchase at The Second City Theater Box Office at 312-337-3992 beginning today at 10am and online at secondcity.com. Here is the complete lineup with my geeky thoughts and opinions included.

Saturday, December 12

10:00am: The Colbert Report featuring writers Peter Grosz and Peter Gwinn as well as co-Executive Producer Tom Purcell (Second City is mining the Colbert zeitgeist with this one, but we’re not complaining about the lineup. Grosz was awesome at the Second City and let’s not forget Gwinn is the brains behind the ridiculous improvised musical Baby Wants Candy.)

11:30am: SCTV — featuring Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy and fellow cast members (The Second City is reuniting the entire SCTV cast for big ticket show on Friday 11. If you can’t shell out the bucks for that, this is your affordable alternative.)

1:00pm: “Voices of Diversity at The Second City” — featuring Chicago’s own Aaron Freeman, Keegan Michael Key of MAD TV and Gary Unmarried, Angela Shelton and Frances Callier of Frangela, Suzy Nakamura of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The West Wing as well as current Second City resident company actors Christina Anthony and Anthony LeBlanc (Suzy Nakamura and Keegen Michael Key both rocked my world during their Second City stints and I’ve since caught Frangela’s ladies in their post Chicago gigs. Ensemble diversity has been problematic in the past; this one sounds very intriguing.)

2:30pm: 30 Rock — featuring cast members Scott Adsit and Jack McBrayer as well as staff writer Kay Cannon (I’m in this for Adsit. I saw him three times in Pinata Full of Bees and his teeny, tiny role on Rock doesn’t do his talents justice.)

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

1:00pm: “Second City: From Stage to Screen” — featuring Jim Belushi, Betty Thomas, Bob Odenkirk of Mr. Show and more (Mediocre sitcoms aside, Belushi was a helluva improviser back in the day. Weirdo Odenkirk was with the Second City for a hot minute, but we’ll take his sly wit any day and Thomas busted boundaries back when women were treated like props at Second City. This one’s a winner.)

2:30pm: Saturday Night Live — featuring SNL alums Tim Kazurinsky, Horatio Sanz and Rachel Dratch as well as current SNL staff writer John Lutz (Given the number of alum plucked by SNL from Second City over the years, this lineup is odd to be sure, but I don’t doubt these folk will have some interesting stories to share.)

4:00pm: “Second City in the Sixties” — featuring Alan Arkin, Fred Willard, Robert Klein, original cast member Mina Kolb along with Second City co-founder Bernie Sahlins and Artistic Consultant Sheldon Patinkin (Arkin, Willard and Klein + Sahlins, Kolb and Patinkin all in one room = best day of my life ever. The one show I won’t miss.)

Second City is set to debut the kids’ show Hogwash in the de Maat Theater on the third floor of Pipers Alley Nov. 8. Tickets will be $10 a pop (and a mom and a kid). The new 50-seat theater is named after late instructor Martin de Maat. (Disclosure: I took classes from Martin at Players Workshop of the Second City in the ’80s and also performed in one of the Second City kids’ shows back in the day.)

Hogwash is an improv show for kids that’s been around a while–in fact, we profiled it in the very first issue of TOC. But Kerry Sheehan, president of Second City Training Centers & Education Programs, told me recently, “We’re going to do our own Second City productions” in the space as well. I spoke with Sheehan for a story in the next issue of Time Out Chicago Kids, which will be out next month, so watch for our roundup of improv classes for little bastards boys and girls.

So, of course, I took my mother-in-law, Marsha. She’s a teacher, in town from the Twin Cities for the weekend. Can you say awkward?

Actually, it was anything but. Griffin is Marsha’s favorite comic and we both had quite a few laughs at her outlandish lines.

“She was way raunchier than she was in Minneapolis,” Marsha said, comparing tonight’s show to a recent Griffin set she caught back home. “I think she could have been raunchier there, but the audience was almost respectful.” Nothing like the party in the Chicago Theatre.

As one of what Griffin estimated as “seven straight guys” in the audience (”I’ve got nothing for you,” she said before telling the wives who’d supposedly dragged them to the show that they had to “blow your man hard” for sitting through the set), I might not have felt the strong bond that the gay men (”Where are my gays?” she hollered early on to a huge cheer) and women did, but I did appreciate how conversational her stand-up is, and how effortlessly she takes the framework of a showbiz anecdote, such as a very funny recounting of hounding Barbara Walters in the bathroom before appearing on The View, and weaves in aside after aside before tying each story up in a rip-snorting bow.

She started by mining nuggets of humor from her youth in the Chicago suburbs and her dysfunctional relationship with her box-wine chugging mom (mom didn’t want her to make fun of the nuns at her old Catholic school, Griffin said, “but those tough dykes can take it”), and moved on to a tour of pop-culture train wrecks ranging from Michael Jackson (shockingly funny bit about the doctor taking the anesthesia needle out of MJ’s arm only to have him instantly start singing, “Whooo hooo”–maybe you had to be there) to Crystal Bristol Palin’s baby daddy, Levi Johnston.

Griffin is smart, smart-mouthed, irreverently irreligious, unabashedly anti-Oprah (”I’m wearing a Kevlar vest,” she said as she heralded the return of “big, fat Oprah,” her favorite Oprah of all) and “so left-wing I’m Sandinista.” I could see that voice and that shtick wearing on me after a while, but for an hour and a half, she was a blast. If you don’t believe me, just ask my mother-in-law, who’s delighted to finally have seen Kathy Griffin in all her profane glory.

Photo by Marina Chavez

Now imagine that exact look on a child version of David Cross. That’s how the show opened – with a mini version of Cross coming on stage, reassuring the audience in true Cross-ian style that “I’m pretty sure God’s told a few white lies, mainly to cancer patients” then stomping off stage in a rage. When the real Cross took the stage, singing a Frank Sinatra-style opening song wherein he promised to “rip comedy a new asshole and then fill that new asshole with jokes,” all knew it would be true.

And lo it was. Cross spent the next hour forty-five touching on his
trademark subjects—religion, politics, ridiculous products, SkyMall— in the same style as his 2004 Grammy-nominated album, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! (In fact, Cross might have given a nod to the album’s second track “Austin Powers Saying ‘Yeah Baby’” by planting a dude dressed like…go ahead, take a guess…that’s right…in the lobby before the show just to make guests uncomfortable).

Despite Arrested Development’s cult following, stints in TV series ranging from Human Giant to Law and Order: Criminal Intent and a purportedly smokin’ hot relationship with Amber Tamblyn, Cross is still pretty damn cynical. Material went from a self-deprecating story about shitting himself while walking his dog to misconceptions about health-care reform (“Every Thursday in Canada is Grandmother Killing Day”) to the Mona Lisa of awful porn titles—a real film titled My Ass Is Haunted. As in previous shows, Cross’s true and most polarizing trump card is his biting criticism of religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity. Case in point: “Whenever I see [Orthodox Jews] walking around in wool from the 18th century, I thank God for letting me not believe in you because they really believe in you and they’re in that and I’m in shorts eating a hot dog.”

Special local guest Mort Burke, who opened for Cross and Bob Odenkirk at the Just For Laughs festival back in June, provided a good bit of staged heckling (including a solid bit about a rogue sign language translator telling his own anti-Semitic jokes to the deaf crowd) while real-life assholes provided genuine heckling, yelling “Fuck you, David Cross! You’re boring” from the balcony just ten minutes before the show’s finale. Cross closed by screening the first five minutes of his new U.K. pilot, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, starring Will Arnett and Spike Jonze. Sure, it will probably never air in the U.S., but at least it’s proof that Cross is still making the funny and one day might bring it back to a regularly scheduled show airing on this side of the sea, God, Yahweh and SkyMall willing.

For more on David Cross, read his TOC interview.

After a likable, if not predictable opening act (musical comedian Henry Phillips), Birbiglia shuffled onstage like a man woken up from a nap—coffee in hand. It was fitting then that the alt storyteller launched into a tale about having to wake up at 4:30am, a time of the day he hilariously described as being “this incomplete time in which the Matrix hasn’t even been built yet.” This was great. He used this as an introduction to life on the road and a perilous adventure at the Peoria airport. As fate would have it, a bunch of Peorians were sitting in the first few rows stage left, and Birbiglia’s ability to weave the enthusiastic bunch into his storytelling throughout the night was impressive.

Birbiglia is a vibrant storyteller, and it’s no wonder his tales have found a home on NPR. He has a very rich cadence, and while each line is very carefully rehearsed and delivered, we were almost convinced that he was telling us these stories for the very first time. Of course, he wasn’t. Some of the material from the evening (which he admitted right off the bat) was pulled from Sleepwalk with Me, and this proved mildly disappointing. I haven’t seen Birbiglia live before, I’m a huge fan of comics bringing new material to the stage every time they tour. Bill Burr, for example, is adamant about this. Given the preponderance of YouTube videos, live albums and Comedy Central specials, there’s so much access to a comic’s material these days that recycled material just doesn’t thrill me, even if it is the first time I’ve heard it live.

But that’s a small gripe. Birbiglia’s story about vomiting on the Scrambler, a carnival ride of woeful consequences, was the highlight of the evening for me. Likewise, tall tales of getting bullied in junior high and kicked in the head on the soccer field were delivered with lethargic panache. Even the finale, a retreaded tale about sleepwalking his way right out of a window at a La Quinta Inn, was inspired and chuckle worthy. I left thinking, I wanna be like Mike! I mean seriously, who wouldn’t?

In the show’s first full sketch, Bauer vaunts her abilities as a comedian by playing multiple characters in a classic romcom love scene. Bauer shows tremendous physical chops as she leaps back and forth between playing a couple canoodling over a romantic dinner while a third (presumably Bauer’s alter ego) looks on in envy. At one point, her hapless character is even held up at gunpoint while the two lovers continue to ogle one another inside the restaurant. It’s a thrill to watch comics jump from one roll to another, and Bauer handles this effortlessly. Ditto a compelling improvised segment where Bauer plays her own doting mother yakking it up with a member of the audience over cream puffs and 2% milk. Bauer shows tremendous listening skills and great commitment to character. Almost the entire scene was brimming with laughs.

But there’s some filler there, to be sure. In one scene, the comedian wanders through the audience encouraging us to give to the United Lucy Fund but misses an opportunity here to really satirize the nonprofit world or the art of asking for donations. Likewise, Bauer’s ultimate act of desperation, a long and windy monologue about a shady character she stalked in her youth, ends the show on an anti-climactic note. But overall Bauer proves that she’s loose-limbed and enjoyable to watch, if not—at least not yet—actually desperate.

Desperate plays Saturdays at 6pm at Gorilla Tango through October 3. Tickets are $10.

American Idol winner Fantasia has received rave reviews for her lead performance, both on Broadway and on tour, in The Color Purple, which hits the Arie Crown Theatre Wednesday 2–Sunday 6. Around Town intern D.L. Hopkins got a few minutes with Fantasia this afternoon following a press conference to announce the show’s new fundraising effort for a Hurricane Katrina relief charity.

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In efforts to restore some 12,000 still-displaced families, the national tour of Oprah-produced Broadway musical The Color Purple has teamed up with New Orleans’ grassroots, volunteer-based org The St. Bernard Project to help rebuild homes. To kick off the fundraiser, the show’s producers and creative team vowed to pay for the first three houses. I sat down with Fantasia, the powerhouse songstress who stars as Celie, to talk about the project and some of her other upcoming endeavors.

Why is this cause so important to you?
While filming the Lifetime bio Life Is Not A Fairytale, I became fond of the city of New Orleans and its people. I got to see first hand how depressed the area was after the disaster. The residents needed a place to call home. I can remember praying that the residents received proper shelter. Before winning American Idol, I came from humble beginnings, so I can relate and am ecstatic to be a part of this initiative.

How willing are you to help?
In addition to putting my face out there, I’d be happy to throw on the tennis shoes and come out and build (laughs). I’m a country girl, so you know the flip-flops are never far away. Let me know and I’ll be there.

Do you feel any added pressure performing in Chicago?
Absolutely! I must bring it. After all, it was here that I received my acting lessons and training. But I’ll be on my toes for each performance.

How do you feel about performing next week in Greensboro, North Carolina, near where you grew up?
It’s been nearly five years since I’ve performed in North Carolina. We don’t get a lot of big-name productions at home and a lot of folks who’d love to see the play can’t afford to travel. This is going to be great for everyone. I am so excited, yet nervous and can’t wait to see everyone.

After spending some considerable time here, what do you think of the city?
Being from a small town like High Point, I do view Chicago as big-city living and I love the shopping, the food and being able to get out and walk. I can’t wait to visit the legendary Edna’s Soul Food Restaurant.

Besides charity and acting, what else can we expect?
An album is slated for 2010. There’ll be some gospel tracks, including a duet with my mother. I’m also following the celeb trend and fans can also catch me on my own reality TV show on VH1.—DLH