The Rob Webber Show

Review by Jeff Catanese

It is somewhat regretful that I was only able to see one of the four teams that make up the group Klaatu.  I figure if the talent is equally spread, then seeing all four teams would afford me the chance to see four strong, resourceful performers to balance out the rest of the group.  In the case of The Jaffes (the seven member team performing at 8:30pm on September 16^th), that one golden performance was given by Rob Webber.  Mr. Webber was the only performer that evening that not only made the laughs flow at a steady pace, but also seemed to understand the fragile connection between improvisor and audience, and made us feel welcome and comfortable.

Klaatu is the brainchild of Greg Sullivan who also runs classes and some other specialty groups as part of the Klaatu family.  He has been running these free shows for sometime, and if the size of the audience the night I saw the show is any indication, his fall season is bound to be quite successful.

The show is an hour-and-a-half of short-form.  Many of the games were old standbys with little or no alteration.  Mr. Sullivan acted as emcee and did a fine and amiable job, using his sharp delivery and quick banter to introduce us to the fun to come.  It was during the actual improv that the evening became painful.

They opened with “Emotional Symphony,” getting the suggestions for everyday objects and

emotions from the crowd.  The emotional commitment was great from everyone in the group, but very few of the performers could cleverly meld their endowed emotions with the objects they were assigned.  It wasn’t until Mr. Webber’s “precocious bench” mentioned, “father says Central Park is full of misanthropes” that the symphony truly rang.

The next game played was a torture-the-actor version of “The Dating Game,” in which Jen Ryan was the bachelorette who had to guess the emotion and occupation of her three suitors: a frustrated fire-eater, a egotistical haberdasher, and a lazy proctologist (ugh!).  Here there were some clever bits, but others that just made the audience wonder what was going on in the actor’s head.  It was a great detraction to the scene that Bob Brinkerhoff’s version of lazy was so low energy that we didn’t even care about the character.  Joe Lunievicz’s egotist came off with great bravado, but avoided the issue of himself, the main topic of any egotist.

The troupe then split into two teams for a scene vs. scene challenge round.  The subject of the first scene was “Ghana” and had both teams failing to come up with anything interesting.  With the input of “French Fries” Caprice Royal smartly went for the obvious and was well supported in her scene about McDonald’s.  The third scene was a take on “The Kentucky Derby”, and when Mr. Brinkerhoff tried to be clever with a scene about a hat, he gave his fellow players few places to go with his initial offer of “My hat finally came.  It’s a derby.”

“Ding” is usually a fun game forcing the players to retract their last statement as the bell rings and replace it with a new one.  However, the fun was removed from this version by the long pauses taken.  It seemed as though the performers didn’t realize that the joy in watching this game came from the idea that they don’t have time to think.  Given that time, they stammered and tried to be funny.  Of course, they failed.  This scene also introduced Ms. Ryan’s third southern character of the evening, which was actually a blessing considering that nobody except she and Mr. Webber was doing any character work at all.

The “Poetry Slam” proposed to introduce us to four types of poetry: Elizabethan verse, Haiku, angry feminist freeform, and Irish pub poem.  The input was “nail polish remover.”  Ms. Royal came off well as the angry feminist, and Mr. Webber once again showed his great gift for character, cleverness and presentation with his drunken Irish poem:

“When I am dead drunk and it’s a quick drink I need,

I like to go partying in the back aisle of Duane Reade.

Aqua Velva tastes great, and it’s money well spent,

I especially like Clorox with its Lemon-fresh scent.

But there’s one thing I won’t drink, I learned when I was young,

Don’t drink the nail polish, ‘cause it sticks to your tongue.

Mr. Lunievicz mentioned some Shakespeare plays but ignored meter overall and quickly went blue, as did Mr. Brinkerhoff who spent a great deal of time counting syllables only to come up with a lackluster haiku about getting an erection.  When Ms. Ryan asked for another input for another round of the same game, it was quite evident that the game should have been over, and they had asked for one too many.

The troupe performed two modified Harold formats during the evening.  Whether it was the disconnected scenes, or the attempt at a cohesive one-act play, they did not explore scenes to their fullest, they anticipated every scene change, they came in with funny offers that had nothing to lend the scenes, and failed to display any teamwork whatsoever.  Being redundant here: the only exception to these gaffes was Mr. Webber.

They also performed two “Torture the Actor” formats.  One with the torture being to say a word/perform an action/guess a sitcom, the other torture being to guess the phrase.  The best thing about either of these was the banter between Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Webber in the latter scene, and the fact that the scene had the extra element of being an item-of-clothing-per-minute strip round with Mr. Sullivan having to reveal some secrets Victoria may not have wanted to know.

“Jeopardy” ran with most of the answers being uninspired and not applicable to anything the characters or the game applied to.  It’s always a pity to see the winner crowned only because his answer sucked the least.  In their styles game they had the same problems that they did with every other scene, but handled the styles well except for the musical style Ska, which left them all looking like deer in headlights.

The best offer of the entire evening came during a game of “Pick-a-Line.”  A wedding scene became pandemonium as the action and the audiences written lines forwarded the events until Mr. Lunievicz’s hand was possessed by a demon.  As he tried to quell the spirit, Niko Triantafillou as the hapless groom actually stood stoically and said, “wait a second,” until the focus was given to him so that he might say his line.  These were the types of obvious blunders that made many of the show’s games seem like exercises in a beginner’s class.

The space they were in had its share of technical problems, which were easily overcome for the most part.  It was disheartening, however, that they had a rather deep stage at their disposal and yet presented most of their scenes on a two-dimensional plane.

From this show, it is hard to say whether or not Mr. Webber is truly talented, or if he simply is far and away the best of this group.  Other troupe members seemed to make up for a lack of performance savvy and inspiration by relying upon personal defaults when they found that they had nothing else to offer a scene.  It’s too bad those defaults included Ms. Royal’s bubbly personality, Mr. Brinkerhoff’s innocent routine, or Ms. Ryan’s flat stomach.  Although all nice things to see, they are certainly no replacement for smart scene work, and conscientious presentation.

In the end I felt the audience had at least gotten their money’s worth.  Of course, until this group is better rehearsed in the fundamental tenets of the form, these shows should remain free.