Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW

Remaining Performances:

Wednesday, July 20 at 6 p.m.
Saturday, July 23 at 2:15 p.m.

They say: “Back by popular DADA-demand! Three Clowns, two Visionaries, and a Musician walk into a bar. THIS IS NOT A JOKE! It is the surreal Cabaret Revoltaire. The guests are visionaries. Beware of Forgeries! Text is from ACTUAL Manifestos. DADA! HAHA!”

Chris’s Take: When Happenstance Theater first brought Manifesto! to Fringe in 2008, we liked it. A lot.

Plenty’s changed since then, but fortunately this whimsically odd crash course on Dada and Futurism stayed the same. It’s still “a multi- and extra-sensory extravaganza” that “bucks all shades of intellectualism.” These “merry pranksters” still “get it.”

(Is it Dada to quote an old review that ran on this very blog? “Haha!” says this lazy critic.)

Led by Happenstance’s husband-and-wife artistic co-directors Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, Manifesto! has sidesplitting laughs not normally associated with century-old cultural philosophies. But thanks to a few slaps of clown make-up, the hammiest pratfalls this side of the Three Stooges, and some absurdly genius takes on the surreal, Mandell and Jaster’s ensemble comedy is a gut-busting kind of funny—all the more impressive considering the dialogue in Manifesto! is largely pulled from actual manifestos.

Looking like a more animated, Master Cleansed Uncle Fester, Jaster plays the middleman of Cabaret ReVoltaire with delightful flourishes and facial tics; his face reflects horror, pride, and anger to equal comedic effect. (And if that doesn’t do it for you, his bald dome doubles as a crystal ball.) Mandell plays the “new girl” hired to sweep the floors. She’s a foil of sorts to Jaster, tittering and goofing like a schoolgirl throughout the performance—even when she’s stripped down to her knickers and given “Futurist clothes.” When the Cabaret’s prim hostess (Gwen Grastorf) steps onto the stage, the weird fun kicks into high gear.

I don’t think I can emphasize this enough: Manifesto! is damn funny stuff. The brilliance behind the comedy, though, is nothing to scoff at—the performance works because of the ridiculous, ill-defined nature of the subject, not in spite of it. Manifesto! weaves Dadaism and Communism against Futurism and Capitalism without explanation, grabbing the audience with no intention of letting go.

Not literally, of course—until the cast does jump off stage, snag audience members, and force them into a Conga line. So on second thought, quite literally. (Da da da da da … DA!)

The cocktail of oddball humor, violence, and audience coercion would normally make Manifesto! one of the fringiest Fringe shows to ever Fringe…if it weren’t held in the air-conditioned Studio Theatre. But Fringiness aside, there’s a lesson to be learned amidst the comedy’s slow-mo fights, gaudy proclamations of cultural superiority, and sizzling funny tango number—sometimes, it’s all we can do to just laugh.

See it if: You’ve been itching for some existential slapstick humor.

Skip it if: You still think this is a pipe.

Studio Theatre (Mead Theatre – 1501 14th St. NW)

Remaining Performances:

Thursday, July 15th, 10:15 p.m.
Saturday, July 17th, 1 p.m.
Sunday, July 18th, 5:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 24th, 8 p.m.

They Say: “Puzzling. Seductive. Film-noir meets radio in a comic cocktail collage ignited by Esquire’s 1949 HANDBOOK FOR HOSTS. Consummate recipes from a time when men were men, dames wore gloves, and sloe gin fizzed.”

Chris’s Take:

Hit me with another just like this, would you? Thanks, Doll. You’re a peach.

Even though it’s adapted, kind of, from a book — the eponymous home-entertaining how-to published by Esquire in 1949, when men were men, etc., etc. — this is an amusement of striking originality and of unceasing sensory pleasures.

After a cleverly choreographed set of opening-title cards (!) follows no story to speak of. The brief here is to establish a seductive, dreamlike, Nighthawks at the Diner sort of tone, and co-production entities Happenstance Theater and Banished Productions have executed like gangbusters. Dame walks into a bar is a more-or-less complete synopsis, though there’s a fun recurring bit with Happenstance co-founders (and spouses) Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell as a pair of easily distracted spies intercepting a transmission of a sonorous-voiced gentleman reading from the titular Handbook. Not exactly Eyes Only, but it’s surely the most seductive prose ever penned about how to carve a turkey.

Melissa Krodman and Michael Sazonov are equally locked into the Truman-era vibe as Femme and Gent, and there’s a vulnerable quality to Krodman’s singing that makes her seem even more fatale than when it takes her half a minute to peel off one of her gloves. When all four performers wagon up around the mic with to harmonize on an advertisement for a defunct brand of coffee, it’s a commercial so non-intrusive the only present-day equivalent would be the personal appeals of that deodorant pitchman.

See it if: You’re prone to powerful fits of nostalgia for the Golden age of radio and fedora-wearing.

Skip it if: You reject out of hand the notion that sometimes style is substance.

Remaining performances: July 11 at 8 p.m.; July 16 at 6 p.m.; July 17 at 8 p.m.; Jul 25 at 4 p.m.

They say: “Classy acts! Captivating Characters! Hosted by Guitar Prodigy Scooter Undercroft, Featuring Izzy and Diz Aster Singing Cheery Songs of the Great Depression, Nicolo the Juggling Accordionist, the Amazing Illusionist Catastrafi, Hotsy-Totsy Dancing Cigarette Girls, the Melodious Pit band, and surprise(d) guests!”

Ted’s take: More clowning reality-reprieve from the resident masters of vintage slapstick.

This year, M.C. Scooter Undercroft welcomes you to the Cabaret CooCoo, which—as the project’s name and pedigree surely attest—is an utterly bonkers evening’s worth of dysfunctional, downmarket cabaret, magical malaprop, and period pasticherie set to a very fetching incidental soundtrack courtesy of accordions, ukuleles, and at least one harmonic saw. The “Hotsy Totsy Dancing Girls” (pronounced “goils”) are also present, but the Flying Zamboni Brothers are not—which sends Scooter AWOL and leaves the rest of the cast scrambling in the service of a show-within-a-show that…well, must go on.

Happenstance, here, is playing to its strengths—vaudevillian funny business isn’t exactly an artistic leap for a group that, as far as Cap Fringe is concerned, has practically cornered the market on the stuff. Which is not to say the performances aren’t versatile: This is an extended family of gifted physical comics, and whether dancing, singing, miming, preaching, mumbling, or staring vacantly at the audience, they execute with equal aplomb. Anchored by the dual charisma of Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell—here, Izzy and Diz Aster, respectively—Happenstance mines the physical idioms of Marceau, Chaplin, and Harpo Marx to produce a show about how art—even and especially disastrous (make that Diz Aster-ous), wildly loopy, fourth-wall-busting art—offers its audience a reprieve from the economic doldrums.

That the latter is the full extent of the concept makes Cabaret CooCoo a slender thing—Jaster, Mandell, et al. are applying their virtuosity to a project so light it’s almost airborne. Last year’s Manifesto! demonstrated that Happenstance is best when retrofitting its elegant mummery onto haut concepts—or whittling those concepts down to more clownlike proportions, as the case may be. In comparison, Cabaret comes off a bit like “Her Majesty”after the dizzying suite on the second side of Abbey Road: Charming, but with the whiff of an afterthought.

Or perhaps it’s better to consider that very lightness a sort of guiding motif: as Jaster demonstrates in his moving, gradually hilarious evocation of the Gershwins’ “Summertime” on the musical saw, dysfunction, and the comedy of the Little Man, can evince pathos and hilarity out of all proportion with the work. “In tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria,” as the old fella once said: The work is in miniature; not so the fame.

See it if: You’ve a yen for an artistically satisfying variety-show send-up…or you feel that after seeing a particularly gruesome Lear down the street, you deserve a good belly-laugh or two.

Skip it if: Your appreciation of the whole vaudeville schtick begins and ends with Lili von Schtupp.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8 PM; Sunday, July 20 @ 3:30 PM; Wednesday, July 23 @ 7:30 PM; Saturday, July 26 @ 9 PM

They say: Manifesto!
Art movement. Political movement.
MANIFESTO! is DADA. Clown is HAHA!
Three clowns, two punk visionaries, and an impresario walk into a bar. This is not a joke! This is a spectacular divertimento to launch the next great movement! Inspired by the PAST, NOW is the FUTURE. MANIFESTO! excites everything!**

Brian’s take: Pearheads. Choo-choo trainsies. Hypnotic spiraling head expanders. Funny HAHA dancing. Wheeling typewriter impostors:::::::::::::::::::::Honky-tonk saw. Stand UP! sit down. (Bald-headed crystal ball). Balloon&Broom&Bicycle wheelie….

Those are just a few examples of the glorious nuggets of nonsense that comprise MANIFESTO!, the Happenstance Theater’s delightful romp through the surreal, unreal, anti-real, ethereal landscape of DADA. This superb ensemble cast, led by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, has taken snippets from texts across four schools of thought–futurism, communism, capitalism, and dada–and artfully fashioned them into an hour-long comedic revue in which, ultimately, dada seeps into and seduces all.

But MANIFESTO! is by no means a history lesson. In fact, it is perhaps the most deftly theatrical display of reading-in-between-the-lines I have ever seen: a multi- and extra-sensory extravaganza with insanely stunning visual imagery stitched together by rag-tag bursts of sound and slapstick.

The show’s creators have apparently drowned themselves in the complete oeuvres of these movements (futurism and dada especially)–not to mention the Chaplin-Keaton-Stooge schools of physical comedy–and they have come up for air only long enough to grab the audience and take it, to the theater-goers’ glee, back down with them to the dada depths. Their commitment to the underlying spirit of the work is unfaltering and their interpretation spot-on: they proudly present the political theater of nonsense, the divine poetry of gibberish, the artistic anti-war protest by anti-artists. Unlike many others who try this very challenging stuff (in this year’s Fringe and elsewhere), these merry pranksters get it.

Oh, and did I mention that MANIFESTO! is funny? Sure, Judd Apatow flicks are funny, reruns of Seinfeld are funny, this Onion video is funny, but MANIFESTO! is funny in a way that eludes most comedy today: it is belly-laugh humor. This rare comedic form bucks all shades of intellectualism; it is not predicated on post-modern or post-pubescent awkwardness, or social satire, or even plain old wit, but on the visceral feeling of what it is to laugh for the sake of laughing, to lose yourself in the delirious hilarity of a moment, to let a bunch of clowns have their way with you, to not worry yourself with getting the joke because you–and everyone else around you–are the joke.

HaHa.

See it if: You’re bored; you’re excited; you’re sad; you’re silly; you’re angry; you’re happy; you’re rich; you’re poor; you’re communist; you’re magical realist; you’re on the verge of death; you’re a newborn; you’re sick; you’re sullen; you’re sullied; you’re Santa Claus….

Skip it if: dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada.

**I must point out that in my opinion the Happenstance Theater has disproved Trey Graham’s previously posited theory that “the more artsy-fartsy the Fringe-brochure come-on, the more unbearable the show is likely to be.”

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