I count only 4 improv shows among the roughly 120 productions in this year’s Fringe and Loser Josh – and I’m sorry to say this is the best thing I’m going to say about the show – is one of them.
In the hands, say, of the great Colin Mochrie (Whose Line Is It Anyway), improv seems easy, but it’s not. It requires actors who have great sensitivity to their audiences, to their scene partners and to their environment. Loser Josh had none of these elements.
Improv actors must know each other’s moves instinctively. These folks seemed to be strangers to each other. Their first instinct frequently appeared to be panic – which they wisely incorporated into their improvised character. Too much panic, though, makes the audience get nervous. And the sensitivity to environment just wasn’t there. There was an incident – “skit” seems too joyous a word – in which one of the troupe was accused of a pernicious murder, and had to guess the identity of the deceased (as well as the murder weapon and the location of the killing) from the clues given by the interrogating detectives. The audience-chosen victim (selected while the accused was out of the room) was former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I was driving down the highway!” volunteered the first detective, in an apparent reference to the national highway system instituted during Eisenhower’s administration. Other members of the troupe shouted similarly academic clues, all of them seemingly unaware of the fact that they were performing in Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, where pictures of Eisenhower are all over the place.
That was followed (or proceeded, I forget which) by an interminable and frankly mystifying long-form improv in which scenes from an unsuccessful attempt to sell real estate to the three little pigs were intercut with scenes in which teenage boys broke into their cult-leader father’s cache of porno films. (This was done in response to an audience member’s selection of the Lionel Richie song “Brickhouse”). At some point, it dawned on me that we were watching improv exercises, not improv. The difference is similar to the difference between acting exercises and acting.
There were some amusing moments. I counted six, but your results might vary. Certainly the smallish, subdued audience was of little help to the troupe. With a better audience and more familiarity among the cast members, this show might be a lot of fun. But for now, Josh is a…well, let the title speak for itself.
- Running Time: 60 minutes
- Loser Josh
- Remaining Shows: Friday, July 11 at 5.45 p.m.; Thursday, July 17, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, July 19, at 5.30 p.m.; Thursday, July 24 at 8 p.m., and Saturday, July 26, at 7.30 p.m.
- Where: Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, 1725 Columbia Road NW The show runs sixty minutes.
As some background, I’m a regular long-form improv performer here in the DC area. Here’s the thing about Loser Josh: they seem to relish in giving one gigantic FU to their audiences. Even the best improv troupes can have a bad show here and there, but Loser Josh does this consistently and, by all appearances, it is their intent.
I hope Loser Josh’s performance won’t sour you on attending other improv in the DC area. Thankfully, it’s not the norm.
There’s nothing worse than reading a bad review of a show you liked than reading a review of that review. Dissecting the opinion of people paid (or at least published) to give their opinion is a dicey game. At worst, it makes you sound like a petulant simpleton or crazed, know-it-all fan. At best, you come off like a pissed-off friend or blinded-by-DNA relative of one of the performers. I’m not pissed off, but I am a friend of one of the performers, a relationship that does the inverse of what you’d think and is well-explained by the “with friends like these,” phrase. Maybe it’s because my mom substitute taught at my middle school and was much more harsh on my friends, or because my job is to edit (find mistakes) or maybe it’s just because I’m jealous, but I tend to raise the bar to silly heights for my acting/writing/improv-ing/card-designing/blogging/crotcheting friends. Because of that I almost didn’t even go to the show, but I’m glad I did. I laughed about once every two minutes, a good clip for a sober afternoon, and it wasn’t the nervous-I-hope-that’s-not-her-mom-in-front-of-me laughter. (It was.)
So, I’m not going to review Tim Treanor’s review of Loser Josh or even edit the cliched ending about the title. Treanor and I did not see the same show — that’s not a device to drive home our different takeaways: He saw the first; I saw the third. And unless Colin Mochrie himself came in to do an intervention between the two, I have a hard time imagining Loser Josh failing so miserably.
Yes, they were doing improv exercises or games — the same ones you see on “Whose Line Is It?, a comparison I only make since that seems to be where the bar was set for this show (talk about your too-silly heights). Yes, I would have cut some skits shorter or hit the buzzer on the game sooner, only because the players had sufficiently got the big laugh. But the sin of stringing out a joke too long is a common one for improv players at all levels — especially at the level with commercial breaks (see SNL, Horatio Sands, et al.) And the sin of audience members can be to second guess every choice made on the stage. Sure, I would have played the suggestion of gay bath house (what is it with audience members and gay anything?) differently, but did the audience laugh at the direction the actors took it in the split second they had to choose? Yes. They laughed. And laughed. And laughed, so much that I lost count — although I could see how counting laughter incidences would be a buzz kill.
Loser Josh, like most Fringe festival performers, takes a certain “let’s just go with this” mentality. Luckily for folks on stage and for me, a good chunk of the audience was ready to go and that willingness made for a good time.
And like most Fringers, who cram in their perfomance lives on the fringes of their professional ones, Loser Josh would benefit from more practices, more stage time, more time to get to know one another before someone has to miss practice because of lacrosse practice pickups, bootcamp sessions, threats of divorce or business trips. Let’s give them that time and be glad they invite us to play along.
I know this comment is dangerously close to petulant, know it all, crazed-fan length, but one more thing about improv acts in general, especially since there were only four in the Fest. In a town where the club named DC Improv is mostly for stand up, let’s not thwart those who stand up on cold stages on hot August afternoons and turn random predictable and pornographic suggestions into something fresh and funnier than anything on TV at 5 p.m. on a Saturday. (note: I did NOT say funnier than anything on HBO or Showtime, I mean, we’re friends and all, but I’m not that big of a Loser.)