MICF - Scott Brennan and Cal Wilson: Mitzi and Hammond Werlitzer's Triumphe De Force

Some characters can be great fun to play, and others can be long, hard comic slogs which require plenty of effort but deliver few genuine (rather than forced) comic moments. Mitzi and Hammond Werlitzer fall into the second category. Mitzi and Hammond are the end-of-their-long-innings vaudeville celebrities trying to squeeze every last moment out of their fifteen minutes of fame. The Wurlitzers are the creations of capable local actor/comedians Scott Brennan and Cal Wilson, and the two performers have an obvious love for the characters they’ve played. The two work fabulously well with each other, feeding off the energy of one another, which was necessary given the lukewarm response of the smallish-but-curious audience. The characters exist in their own showbizzy, parallel universe of dead lovers and stuffed cats, which only occasionally intersects with the real world. At the start, the premise has some promise, but it’s impossible to sustain for the full hour. Soon, the catchphrases and knee-slapping of the two becomes a tad grating, and the jokes start to wear thin. As strong improvisors, Brennan and Wilson seem constrained by their script, and inside you sense that the two want to break free of it and be another version of Dame Sybil Thorndyke, the British theatrical dame played by Canadian Sean Cullen, whose ridiculous storytelling is almost entirely improvised. Triumphe De Force is a brave and noble (not of the Ross variety) effort at character comedy, but falls short on laughs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to build a
Read more

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Much in a name

Image
Naming a child is one of the greatest responsibilities a parent has. Short of some dramatic action by its bearer, a person is stuck with a name for life and all the nominative determinist consequences that flow from it. While opening it up to the whims of the democratic process was one option ( Baby McBabyface? ) and engaging the services of a baby name consultant was another, Melanie and I opted to take on the responsibility ourselves. Our criteria? We wanted a name that suited a child as well as the adult she will become. We wanted a name that conveyed both warmth and gravitas. We wanted a name that carried some broader meaning, within our family and beyond it. We wanted a name that was easy to say and easy to spell. And we wanted a name that sounded good, in its entirety and when each part stood on its own. For us, it wasn’t just the given names that needed to be chosen. With Melanie and I each keeping our family names when we got married, our daughter’s family name also
Read more