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by Michael Staffa

show reviewed June 6th, 2002

When the doors close and the lights dimmed and only thirteen people are in a theater that can hold ninety, one begins to wonder where the other seventy-seven people went. In the music world Elvis was the King, certainly this collection of "velvet" Elvises (Elvii?!) could attract more fans?

The show opened with hosts Marcus Muggli and Mark Mahon explaining their troupe and mentioning their special guests Nels and Joel. There was a sense of confusion on stage in the introduction, the gathering of suggestions, and the scenes themselves.

The first game played was a short form game called 60-30 where "purse" was to be the item the scene was to surround for 60 seconds. Then the scene was done over again for 30 seconds and then again for 15 seconds. At times there was a lack of dialogue in the 60-second scene, which seemed to be an easy way to do the scene again in 30 seconds. The scene was similar to the story of Cinderella and, with the lack of dialogue in the longer scene, it was all too easy to shorten the scene. This game had its moments of emotion and physical comedy, but it seemed the performers took the easy route in simply talking less at first to make the quicker scenes easier. Whether the lack of dialogue was to simplify their quicker scenes or because they were uncomfortable on stage was hard to tell.

There was an inadequate effort to explain the idea behind the next game they were about to play to the thirteen of us. A "Freeze Tag" type game where the emotion "joy" and the location of "Hawaii" were used by alternating performers who continued on from the "frozen" position of previous performers. Mr. Muggli carried the scene with his subtle use of the Hawaii location and started and ended the scene while quietly roasting a boar on an open fire. Mr. Muggli and the newest Elvis, Jen Scott did wonderful jobs of creating defined characters, creating problems and solving them.

In most of the games played, there was musical accompaniment and sound effects added by a tech person. The music was decent and at times complimented the scenes well, but too many times it over powered the dialogue on stage. The added sound effects had some good moments as well. However, there were many times where sound effects were added when it would have been much more simple for the performer to do the sound themselves. There were times where there seemed to be confusion between who would supply the sound effects. This led to awkward silence or multiple sounds being produced by both the off stage mike and the performer.

The Velvet Elvises had a two person special guest group simply called "Nels and Joel" perform. Nels Lennes and Joel Gray (who perform with the Minneapolis based "Collective") brought a breath of fresh air to the show. They immediately called the small crowed "a rowdy bunch" which helped lighten the mood of the audience a little. Their scenes where strong and the characters well defined. Mr. Gray did a wonderful job of adding random objects to scenes and the audience watched with awe as Mr. Lennes justified them with ease. These two performers did a 20-minute intermission show of longform based on the word "angst." These guys where good, then their 20 minutes where over and I saw something amazing and disappointing at the same time. Of the thirteen people in the audience, four of them got up and left. The audience count was down to nine.

The Velvet Elvises came back on stage for a closing longform scene. Their final scenes were based on "Play-Doh" and consisted of well thought up ideas and characters, but were poorly executed. With more people in the audience to help spread contagious laughter and the construction of strong scenes, rather than fighting to get jokes or lines out on stage, the Velvet Elvises would have great potential. I gave the Velvet Elvises two stars for this show based on the timid display of their improv, which could easily be attributed to the lack of an audience that might make it hard to perform at times. But I have to take into account the performance of Mr. Lennes and Mr. Gray and the way in which they handled the small crowd with ease. I recommend the Velvet Elvises if you want to escape another night of watching TV. I recommend Mr. Lennes and Mr. Gray if you want to see sound improv art on stage.