Menllenium Saves the World

Hollywood has taught us well: when something works once, make it pay off twice with a sequel. Go Comedy! welcomes the return of its resident fictitious, flirtatious, flagrant boy band in Menllenium Saves the World (written by the cast, director Tommy LeRoy, and assistant director Michelle LeRoy). An indulgent retread with a detective twist, this Thursday/Friday primetime offering is a winking spoof on the pitfalls and artificiality of the sequel format, hitting as many snags in the execution as it does high notes.

Returning viewers are reminded, and new ones caught up, by a opening number reintroducing the main players and their chief personality traits: egotist Kevin (Andrew Seiler), rebel Jayson (Micah Caldwell), sensitive imbecile Marcus (Tommy Simon), resident pervert J.D. (Clint Lohman), and fallible manager/handler Sarge (Ryan Parmenter). Having spent the first installment developing the characters and making discoveries about the relationships, the sequel requires the band to do something; naturally, they are summoned to the Vatican to solve a murder. Borrowing from 70s-era cartoons such as Scooby-Doo and the Harlem Globetrotters series, the fellas are drawn into a topical mystery full of religious overtones, murderous Mayans, and the end of the world. Joined by their new church-official friends Daphne (Christa Coulter) and Father Oftlen (Dan Brittain), they warble and thrust their way to the case’s resolution.

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Montag and Marbles

From inspired improvisation premise to impeccable scripting to superb team performance, Brian Papandrea and Josh Campos are Montag and Marbles, in every respect. Their brainchild, now occupying the late-night Thursday time slot at Go Comedy!, casts the pair in static roles as the two halves of a ventriloquist act — or, as the show poster succinctly quips, “a dummy and his puppet.” With keen leadership by director Pete Jacokes, this clever creative stricture bears ample fruit in a blazingly funny one-act production that wrings possibility from every angle.

Presented as a retrospective, the show chronicles the few triumphs and many tribulations of a near-forgotten comedy team: Montag the Magnificent (Campos) and Mr. Marbles (Papandrea). The framework takes the form of a satiric Tyme Lyfe infomercial, the kind of hokey low-budget sales pitch for complete DVD collections generally only seen at desperate post-midnight hours through bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. Crucially, the device eases pressure on the story while still retaining a clear narrative, a welcome packaging that plays to the strength of vignette. With the back story and characters established, it’s up to the finely polished script to develop and evolve a decades-long partnership, which it does with carefully plotted tie-ins, repetition of key material in the act, and one wacky montage of perfecting mad voice-throwing skills.

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Wirelessless

Joe Hingelberg and Travis Pelto rain down characters onto the Go Comedy! stage in the improv duo’s original production Wirelessless. Written by Pelto and Hingelberg with direction by Bryan Lark, this late-night Thursday offering takes away the web as we’ve come to know it, and in its place follows the smaller, conspicuously tighter web of one peculiar technology-addicted society.

Unrestrained wireless internet access is what put Webbland on the map, so when the signal goes down for four consecutive days, the city finds itself in the throes of fiscal and identity crises. The risible mayor and a team of experts scrambles to reconnect with the manned Webbland satellite, a slight but curious mystery of lost and found web access that serves as the backbone of the plot. However, the meat of the play is found in the larger effects on the town and its people: the city’s downtown tollbooth suffers decreasing traffic and revenues, stores are all but abandoned, and disillusioned residents grumble about defecting to the rival community of Neighborton. Hingelberg and Pelto portray at least a dozen characters each, a revolving door of diverse personalities, opinions, and motives hardly limited to the crisis at hand. The scenes hop capriciously from place to place, aided by Lark and Peter Jacokes’s thrumming sound design (including great contributions by Jaws That Bite). But here, pausing is more exception than rule: character transitions are frequently instantaneous, often specified by a single accessory, which banishes mere two-person scenes in favor of filling each locale with activity and humorous content.

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The Tim Machine

In the early days of Go Comedy! Improv Theater, original sketch comedy shows were generally Christmas novelties. Now in its fourth year, the company has been returning to the form with increasing frequency and consistency: sketch shows regularly fill the scripted-Thursday time slot and further venture into Friday’s mainstage performance schedule. The latest in the line is The Tim Machine, written by the ensemble cast and director Nancy Edwards, with additional writing by Genevieve Jona. Stretching backward and forward in time, no less than 40 years in each direction, this production achieves roaring multi-era success by laying out all kinds of storytelling and time-traveling rules and adhering to one above all the rest: Do what’s funny.

The viewer first lands in 1972, at almost the same moment as protagonist and time traveler Tim (Tim Kay). Having intended to venture from 2052 to the 2012 Occupy Detroit movement, he overshoots and finds himself in the middle of a central-casting version of a hippie revolution. The 70s agitators are angling for an end to war; civil rights for women, minorities, and homosexuals; and taking power back from the corporate Man…oh, that sounds familiar. It’s not lost on Edwards and company (nor on the audience) that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but that’s not all that this production has in store.

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Mid-Life Christmas

One could glean from the title of Mid-Life Christmas, Go Comedy!’s third annual holiday sketch show, that the well of holiday-themed content may be drying up at Southeast Michigan's preeminent improv theater. But based on the razor-sharp humor and screaming breakneck energy of director Pj Jacokes and his ensemble, one would be wrong. Indeed, this is a tightly packed and wildly varying show with not a misstep in sight.

From the outset, an army of characters hurtles across and around the stage, portrayed by a half dozen performers. As suggested by the title, the bloom is off the rose for many of these Christmases; life’s little disappointments and missed expectations are somehow magnified at the holidays, a theme that pervades these hilariously awkward sketches (written by Jacokes and cast). As newlyweds, Jen Hansen and Tommy Simon keep the conflict amicably realistic as they negotiate shared holiday time between their two families. Bryan Lark lends an undercurrent of maliciousness to a composer putting his distinctive spin on a famous Christmas tune. In the longest post-layoff elevator ride ever, Christa Coulter and Chris DiAngelo use much more than words to maximize their excruciating discomfort. And the Christmas Eve Macy’s dressing room is ground zero for Carrie Hall, who enacts the mother of all pubescent humiliations with perfect physical comedy.

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