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| CIF
2001 Supplement
Reviews Land of the Karaoking Improvisors Upright Citizen's Brigade's ASSSCAT Whose Chorus Line Is It Anyway?
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Sublime Carl & the Passions Carl & the Passions is made up of a tight, smooth bunch of improv professionals, performing a traditional Harold format. The groups’ work was very relaxed and low key, their character work was rich, favoring real over “nutty” characters, and their edits (an actor stopping the action of a scene to describe the environment) were effective in a way that’s rare in Harold work, they enriched the scenes rather than distracted from them. Three story lines
were set up – a compulsive gambler is being pressed to pay his debt, a
writer and his wife struggle with his impotence and a woman is selling
off her mother’s estate. Each
piece had a very film noir feel to it, you didn’t ever expect or even
hope for a happy ending. In
the gambler scene, the players had fun with this format.
Every time the action was stopped to do an edit, they assumed a
period of time had passed, and came back to the scene throwing their
partner a non sequitur. The strongest story
line concerned the couple, Michael and Gabrielle.
Gabrielle is interrupting Michael’s late night writing session
in an attempt to revive their sagging love life.
In a flash back, we see them as a college couple.
As we come back, we see why they’ve grown apart – in college,
Gabrielle was his inspiration, and since then he’s grown and moved
forward, but she hasn’t. She’s
shattered when she discovers his latest work doesn’t feature a
character based on her. The third story line
started as a mundane estate sale. A
buyer, Steve, comes in to inquire about lamps.
We’re quickly brought into the story, discovering that the
woman, Rebecca, was selling off her mother’s estate, and the man, a
rich, yet socially inept person, tries to pick up the grieving woman. Ironically and believably, he gets the girl in the end. They avoided the
pitfall of trying to pull all these stories together, of making these
characters related to each other. But
in the final scene, we do see the writer selling off his apartment’s
contents (presumably after the divorce) to Steve, the buyer from the
other story line. And this
ending was the essence of what makes a Carl & the Passions show such
a sublime experience, they never do too much, but with a light touch,
balance poignancy and humor in a way that is satisfying, like a
well-cooked theatrical meal.
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