Slow News Day

Remaining performances:
July 15 at 9:30 .m.; July 17 at 7:45 p.m.; July 26 at 1:30 p.m.

They say: Politics? The Economy? Global Warming? Not so much. This news crew specializes in made-up stories and behind-the-scenes shennanigans. Slow News Day brings you the news as you see it—improvised based on your suggestions.

Ted’s take: Reviewing an improv show is less like critiquing theater and more like covering the Mets: You can report what happened, discuss the homers and the bobbles, &c., but there’s no guarantee that what you saw on one day will have any relation to what’ll happen the following. I say this not only because Slow News Day (structured as a triptych of on-air reports, behind-the-scenes buffoonery, and commercial interludes), is bound to vary wildly from one night to the next, but also because it’s a lot like watching the Mets—intermittently worthy, and just as uneven.

The gist: you write the headlines; anchorpeople Ryan Gillis and Pamela Nash deliver ‘em; reporter-in-the-field Min Cho reports from, um, the field; and editorial troublemaker Seaton Smith presents screeds against Maryland Drivers, cupcakes, and his own substance-abuse problems. Meanwhile, all is not lollipops and dandelions backstage, as a well-meaning but corrosive intern (J.W. Crump) accidentally torches Pam’s car, and Ashley Whitehurst does her damnedest to help co-intern Katie Dufresne snag a full-time reporting job. The producer, meanwhile, lingers in the production box, his disembodied voice hilariously mistaken, time and again, for that of God. All of the above, of course, touted as extemporaneous, original schtickage.

Here, I suspect, there’s a bit of corner-cutting going on: some of the best tropes smack of having been rehearsed, as when Gillis—gleefully, muggingly—struggles to slip his undersize jacket onto his oversize frame before the cameras go live. Gillis has a number of equally funny, and more improvisatory, triumphs, but the truest ex tempore chops reside with Crump, Dufresne, and Whitehurst, a trio known elsewhere as TV-MA. The commercials enacted by these three (today’s: prescription soup; kitten potty-training toilet seats; chocolate toothpaste) are among the show’s highlights; likewise their foible-laden camaraderie as the news show’s pissant interns.

It bears noting that this is a tremendously ambitious undertaking. Many more seasoned improvvers restrict their shows to short-form “games,” rather than attempting extended, character- and plot-based invention. Which perhaps speaks to the main difficulty here—that the cast is forced to focus more on the motivic unities than on the jokes. And the jokes, folks, should be sacrosanct.

See it if: You’ve always wished that SNL’s “Weekend Update” went on for, oh, say, an hour and change.

Skip it if: You’ve little patience for repeated quips about Maryland drivers and “drugs.”

Not without its highlights, though, and certainly replete with the requisite Fringe-isms. Fake breasts? Check. Um, more fake breasts? Double-check. Duplicitous robots from space? Indeed. Desultory allusions to Beckett, Wilde, Shakespeare, et al. wielded with the weight of a French tickler? Duh.

Below the jump, a telegraphic rundown on last night’s 23 previews.

Deep breath!~ Here we go:

• Let’s Sing Gospel 101!, in which the magnanimous Rosita Mathews induces her mainly white audience to shout, stomp, clap, and otherwise make a joyful noise.
• Uncorseted, a gender-bender purportedly relating to the 1893 World’s Fair. Lots of gents wearing wigs & padded bras, prancing about and “dueling” with plastic swords. Expect as much phallic wordplay as phallic swordplay.
• Headscarf and the Angry Bitch: A woman, a hijab, a guitar, and an innocuously irreverent song cycle about “growing up Muslim in America.” The humor seems to revolve around Pakistan, Facebook, and goats.
• Captain Squishy’s Yee Haw Jamboree (the musical): The gentlefolk behind last year’s smash I Like Nuts! (the musical) return to Fringe with a tale about a Country & Western variety show and the WWI German agent who infiltrates it to spread sedition and funny accents.
• Lila: The Love Story of Radha and Krishna: Entrancingly programmatic classical Indian dance.
• Missing Pages: A daughter uncovers her father’s war diary and past as a WWII spy. Vietnam, Iraq parallels.
• Krapp’s Last Powerpoint: Promising title; no apparent relation to its Beckett namesake. (Unless you count the whole one-man-alone-with-audience-and-memory thing.) Also, faith-healing seems to be involved.
• Riding the Bull: Something about a rodeo clown, Godsburg, TX, and a handful of giggle-worthy pop culture references. Also, original banjo tunes from “New York City’s Angriest Yodeling Banjo Player.”
• She Moved Through the Fair: One-woman show; reminiscences of a brandy-swilling Irish lass delivered in a soupy brogue.
• Irish Authors Held Hostage: Another black comedy from Martin McDonagh? Nope—just a historical mash-up, in which the usual cast of Irish men o’ letters (Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, &c.) get kidnapped by terrorists “of every stripe.” Last night’s short—Oscar Wilde taken captive by Al Qaeda—had the audience (rightfully) in stitches.
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, in which Nu Sass Productions cuts Stoppard’s fringe darling down to an 85-minute, all-women adaptation. Ambitious—and, if the preview’s any indicator, ripe for chaos.
• SOUP!, an all-in-the-timing series of comedy shorts. Wednesday’s excerpt—a dysfunctional husband-wife cooking show—split some serious sides.
• MAY 39TH/40TH, a tale from the future (the yr. 3009, to be precise), in which the more things change (lots of clones) the more things stay the same (dating “still blows chunks”).
• Please Listen: A Musical Chaos: This year’s rock & roll spectacle. Two musicians kidnap a record exec and assault his ears with their opus—a concept album about duplicitous robots from space.

OK, at this point in last night’s proceedings there was a mandatory beer break. Given the feat-of-endurance nature of this post, I’d recommend the same thing here.

Back? Good.

• Bare Breasted Women Sword Fighting: Wait, didn’t we just hear about this? Ah…this one involves actual women, who dance, wrestle, and—yes—duel, all in the name of “vaudeville.” Also, if we’re to believe the hype, there’s actual toplessness. If, y’know, you’re into that sort of thing.
• My Fabulous Sex Life: Confessions of a gay man’s sexual awakening in D.C. Funny; brash; almost inconceivably explicit.
• Slow News Day: Able, audience-participatory improvisation about TV news. If you delight in such things, this one is a no-brainer.
• Herbie: Poet of the Wild West: A totally irreverent take on Hamlet that involves eye-patches and six-shooters. Also, since it’s Fringe, a token lesbian cowgirl.
• The Escapades of Farty Johnson: OK, I’m gonna go out on a limb here. This was the most thrilling four minutes of the entire program. I have no idea whether there’s a plot (if there is, it seems to revolve around a delusional woman auditioning for an unsympathetic director). Farty (or, as she called herself onstage, “Toots…because girls don’t fart”) apparently specializes in an offbeat quadrille that somehow communicates deep sadness while keeping the audience in stitches. Can it sustain over the full 45 minutes? Who knows. But if Patricia Krauss wasn’t the most gifted physical comedian in the room last night, that’s only because David Gaines was sitting in the back.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Collection of One-Acts: Asks the question, “Can’t murder be innocent?” Looks for answers in ways Dostoevskyan (”Dude, let’s kill a homeless guy!”) and otherwise.
• The Real Adventures of Tom Mix: Based on the “real-life” adventures of the early-Western film star, this seems to boil down to a lot of monologues delivered from under the brim of a major-league Stetson.
• Jack, The Ticket Ripper: Slasher-farce about an overenthusiastic usher who goes all Titus Andronicus on playwrights, bartenders, and pretty much everyone else.
• Pepe! The Mail Order Monkey Musical: Two understimulated brothers order a mail-order monkey, throwing a wrench into the machinations of their social-climbin’ mother.

But what did you think? Let us know in the comments.

Selah.