Bumbershoot review: live and local theater and comedy

For Bumbershoot, I spent much less time watching live music than can be expected of a music critic. Instead, I spent quite a bit of time at the Theater Puget Sound stage in the Center House watching local theater and a little bit of time at the Vera Project watching local standup comedy. I’m glad I did, too. There’s a lot of local talent on stages and they are very, very smart and funny.

On Saturday, I saw Wing-It Productions’ Election Show. It was an improv satire of our political process. There were four presidential candidates, one incumbent and three challengers. All of whom promised things that they couldn’t possibly deliver, like a commitment to repealing all laws of gravity, or not having to see unpleasant things. The improvisation took place when the candidates fielded questions from the crowd, including being asked about the practical effects of zero gravity. It didn’t take any sides and avoided any actual partisanship (they resurrected the long dead Whig and Bull Moose parties for the characters; I forgot which had the power of incumbency). That everyone is such a strong improv player and sold their characters well, with only brief moments of awkwardness is a testament to how solid Wing-It Productions has been for many, many years. Election Show will continue through Election night on Thursdays and Fridays at their theater in the U-District.

People’s Republic of Komedy’s Laff Hole was also very funny in the Vera Project. It was seventy-five minutes of standup from some hilarious (and some not so) local comedians. I particularly liked host Kevin Hyder’s impressions. One was of a pirate giving relationship advice to a friend over the phone and another was “An illiterate carnival worker on a date at a legitimate restaurant, trying to play it cool.” You probably had to be there, but if you were, you were probably laughing hard.

Comedienne Yola Lu had a funny bit about her mother wanting her to be overweight (she’s not and she’s perfectly lovely) to keep men from finding her attractive. “Actually, mom, the guys I fool around with think my low self-esteem is very sexy,” she said. Jason Goad had a routine about the polite ways in which he’s been insulted for being heavy. It was very funny and played into Seattle’s passive-aggressive stereotypes.

Kate Jaeger’s one-woman show Miss Fanny’s Fun Box was probably the funniest 45 minutes I experienced all weekend. She has a character named Miss Fanny, who is a children’s show host, not too unlike Shari Lewis, and her TV show is going off the air to minimal attention. It gave Jaeger the means to use plenty of innuendo and double-entendres for her character who was growing increasingly bitter and desperate. She brought two volunteers on stage to help make “fun bags” (sandwich bags with a few beans in them; “we’ll make two because most things are better in pairs”) and noted that “Mr. Fanny used to like my fun bags, but found someone with bigger fun bags that were full of plastic.”

One song she sang had a line that goes, “You can’t sleep in mommy’s bed because she met Jimmy and now she’s acting like a whore…iffic person.” I’m pretty sure Kate Jaeger, an improv comedienne and actress, could make anything funny. She’s got incredible comedic timing and create a character that is hilarious and endearing. Like Miss Fanny says, “Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are the ones that aren’t your idea.”

Sandbox Radio Live closed the Theater Puget Sound stage for the weekend, and it was as wonderful as I could have hoped for. I’ve been a Sandbox Radio evangelical since I first started listening to the podcast. It was a sort of “best of,” but done like a shorter taping of a live podcast. Cell phones were turned off because of interference and there were a few retakes they had to do, just like during the tapings of full episodes at West of Lenin.

The bits they performed included Elizabeth Heffron’s “T-Minus” from episode three, an excerpt from Paul Mullin’s “Markheim” series, Mullin’s “Tales from the 358” (actual conversations from the sketchy Metro route performed as theater) and Scot Augustson’s very funny PSA for something called “World Arts Access.” I’ve heard all of these routines and only attended the taping of episode five, so it was a treat to see the bits I’m familiar with performed live, even repeated. Like Sandbox Radio’s maven and host Leslie Law says before the first do-over something like, “if you found something funny the first time, be sure to laugh again.”

{Sandbox Radio photo by Lori Paulson.}