Hooray for Kamikazes!

At last we've arrived at one of the high festival seasons of the year. No, not the solstice; that's another blog! It's 14/48, the world's quickest theater festival! The four weekends of 14/48 each year are among our favorite theater events.

Nick Edwards is a hilarious pirate.

The usual concept is to choose a theme, send seven playwrights home Thursday evening to write a one-act play about that theme, have seven directors cast those new works the next morning, bring musicians and designers in and watch everyone work together until the plays are performed Friday evening. Then they choose a theme Friday, send the writers home again, and do it all over. Fourteen world premiere plays in 48 hours. This weekend they're raising the stakes a little. In the "Kamikaze" version of 14/48, everyone involved shows up not knowing what their function is going to be! Someone who is usually an actor or designer could draw "playwright" out of the hat, or someone who only plays kazoo might end up in the band. The band employed kazoos for several tunes last night.

It all sounds insane, and it probably is, but it typically produces some enjoyable theater. Last night's lineup was solid from first to last.

We bumped into Ashley Bagwell outside the theater as we arrived. He was very tired and more than a little nervous. He drew one of the playwright straws, though he'd never written a play before. His "Horton's Last Leg" was the first play of the evening, a touching tale directed by Lyam White and featuring K. Brian Neel, who was fantastic as Horton, the pooch who was about to be put down. The last play on the program was "The Final Curtain" by Beth Peterson, directed by Mark Fullerton. This play was laugh-out-loud funny, a script self-referential to 14/48, featuring Wayne Rawley as the pompous and sadistic king who sends his motley band of players home to work up something new for tomorrow. I also especially enjoyed "On Three," written by Chris Haddad and directed by Brandon Felker, about the remote mass suicide of a trio of World of Warcraft players; Beth Raas-Bergquist's character was going to off herself using an electric chair she'd purchased because of its five-star reviews on Amazon Prime. Think about that for a minute. Also loved "The Medallion's Clasp," by Mik Kuhlman directed by Susanna Burney, because Nick Edwards and Scotto Moore are two hilarious pirates.

Tonight's theme is Occam's Razor. Seven more world premieres coming up at 8pm at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway. We'll be there.

Take and eat...ewww!

At the risk of being struck by lightning I attended a performance of Three Men and a Baby Jesus, the current late-night offering at Balagan Theatre. I'm happy to report that there were no electrocutions and a lot of laughs at the one-act show, written by Balagan company member Matt Smith and directed by artistic director Shawn Belyea.

L-R: Ray Tagavilla, Ashley Bagwell, the Savior, and
Curtis Eastwood in Balagan Theatre's Three Men and a
Baby Jesus. Somehow they remind me of Steve
Guttenberg, Tom Selleck, and Ted Danson.

The cast is a quartet of Balagan regulars: Ashley Bagwell and Curtis Eastwood, who head up the company's late- and off-night programming efforts; the fabulous Ray Tagavilla; and the hilarious Megan Ahiers.

Bagwell plays the CEO of a toy company, worried for his job on Christmas Eve because an ill-conceived marketing ploy has led to a sizable shortfall in the firm's books. Eastwood is the corporate attorney, whose answer to every problem is booze and strippers. Tagavilla is the newbie from sales who they bring in to try to fix the books. The character is Jewish, so doesn't mind working on Christmas Eve; he lives with his mother and has questionable social skills and some decidedly odd quirks.

Santa Claus (Ahiers) leaves the baby Jesus to this trio's office on the big night, with the task of protecting the savior from the forces of evil while she is out prowling chimneys. Ahiers also portrays a couple of those forces: the corporation's board chair who has the goods to soothe the child, but who also swings between promoting and sacking the lot of them; and a surprise super-demon that is one of the funniest and fowl-est villans yet seen on stage.

The three wise guys are skeptical of the baby's divinity, but are later convinced largely through Smith's interesting interpretation of the Eucharist. But let's face it: bodily functions are what infants are all about. Even so, they find it hard to resist making the kid the center of the ad campaign to save the foundering company. Even though Santa suffers a horrible demise, the show has a decidedly uplifting ending. This fun and funny play is a great alternative to sappy holiday theater fare.

Three Men and a Baby Jesus plays this weekend and next at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway. Shows are at 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets are $10 (though anyone with an Internet connection has probably heard of the password to get in for half price. If you haven't, the box office is always willing to offer hints.)

Check it out!

Full disclosure: Your author is a board member of Balagan Theatre, but it doesn't mean I'm biased!

Big laughs at Schmee's Silverstein feast

A talented cast and some bawdy material added up to a fun evening of laughs at the Theater Schmeater production of An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein, directed by Julia Griffin.

All 10 one-act plays on the evening were gems:

The auctioneer (Ashley Bagwell) ogles the goods (Alyssa Keene)
in "Going Once", one of 10 one-act plays in An Adult Evening of
Shel Silverstein. It plays at Theater Schmeater through
June 12. Photo by Regan MacStravic.

Jen and Sherwin play a high-stakes game of who-do-you-save? in "The Lifeboat is Sinking." A forceful Lisa Viertel ultimately convinces Matthew Middleton that it's his mother that needs to be tossed into the drink to save the rest of the family.

"Smile" is a great one, in which Gibby (Middleton) is harshly interrogated by Snooky (Ashley Bagwell), Bender (Alyssa Keene), and Jimbo (Sara Coates). They take Gibby out back and do him in for designing the smiley face and coming up with a variety of grievous pop-culture catch phrases over the years.

Viertel is again brilliant as Georgia, the proprietor of "Watch and Dry," a laundry facility in which nothing gets clean, much to the dismay of Marianne (Megan Ahiers). Marianne is about to turn in Georgia to the Better Business Bureau, only to learn that Georgia really has gone through Marianne's dirty laundry to learn things about her that the authorities would be most interested in. Life lessons, just $2.50 per load.

"Thinking Up a New Name for the Act" is a play with only three words--meat and potatoes--yet the entire domestic scene, murder, trial, and execution are easy to follow. Coates swings a mean frying pan.

Bagwell is at the center of two sex-for-sale segments. He auctions off Keene like a horse in "Going Once."

In "Buy One, Get one Free,"
Bagwell plays Lee,
potential John to hookers Merrilee and Sherilee.
The sketch is funny, you see
Because each line ends in rhyme with tee-hee!

Keene and Ahiers are the two-for floozies.

Michael D. Blum turns in one of the best man-plays-dog performances ever. This time he's a talking dog, Barney, who can't seem to convince his human, down-and-out blues singer Blind Willie (John Q. Smith) that a talking dog would be a more profitable act than blues singer in a deserted alley.

Blum and Viertel also are great in "Bus Stop", in which Blum carries a sign that is modified to read "Bust Stop" and the two of them lustily think up all the alternate names they can for hooters and Johnsons.

Coates is hilarious as a bag lady in the making in "One Tennis Shoe." Finally, Smith and Ahiers are fabulous in "The Best Daddy." This is the one of the plays my Sweetie, the official scorer, and I had seen before. It was part of the first Death/Sex production at Balagan Theatre back in February of 2009.

Hey, I mentioned them all! This is great material and the cast is truly outstanding. An Adult Evening with Shel Silverstein at Theater Schmeater is a lot of fun. It runs through June 12, but tickets have been going rapidly, so order yours early.

Death, Sex a riot at Balagan

Balagan Theatre's Death, Sex has it all: a vampire, hot chicks, passionate Russians, a drowning man, a magician, a waitress, a bigoted defense attorney, a lying defendant, a mean dad, a disappointed teenager, and about an hour's worth of belly laughs.

Weisenheimer caught the opening-night performance of Death, Sex, a collection of six ten-minute comedies, on Feb. 6. It will be running all month, but you ought dash out there tonight; it would be a perfect Valentine's Evening outing.

The cast are all marvelous and hard-working. LaChrista Borgers puts in triple-duty, playing Simone, one of the babes stalked by the Vampyre in the opening segment; as Tanya, who may cause Mike Dooly's Volodya to stray from his "kitten" Lili (Megan Ahiers) in The Only Leg He's Got; and Lisa, the poor young thing who doesn't get a very good present for her birthday in Shel Silverstein's The Best Daddy. Borgers is especially hilarious in the latter, as her daddy, also delightfully portrayed by Ashley Bagwell, torments her with "Birthday fools" gifts. What's under the blanket? A dead pony? Her dead sister? The motorcycle she's always wanted? Who knows.

Chris Bell is a riot as Langford, the vampire in Vampyre, and he's a real one, not just an actor acting in a vampire flick. He's also great as the magician in Orange, Lemon, Egg, Canary, courting Ahiers the waitress in the segment that's far more sweet than the others. Jason Harber directed that one, and acts in two others, as Derek the director in Vampyre and as the defendant in David Mamet's Scene 2 of Romance.

The show received a strong review from the Weekly. Balagan is value priced and marvelously entertaining. Go!