Tomorrow's Childs
With This Is the Week That Is, 1812 has found an annual show that changes nightly.
; "GOOD NEWS: TW3 offers laughs aplenty � little stinging or surprising, but all smart and current.")
Mark Garvin
GOOD NEWS: TW3 offers laughs aplenty — little stinging or surprising, but all smart and current. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
Theater companies are often wary of sameness. Cling to it too long and you risk staleness. Switch things up too often and you squander the chance to launch a tradition. With This Is the Week That Is, now in its second edition, 1812 Productions has found a happy medium: an annual show that changes nightly.
The company has long sidestepped the safe Dickensian choices to carve out a legacy of atypical holiday fare, starting with 2000's The Big Time: Vaudeville for the Holidays and continuing with salutes to 1950s humor, improv, funny women, comic duos and, more recently, political humor. "It didn't start out to be a tradition," artistic director Jen Childs explains, "but it's become that — yet it's also challenging each year to create a new show."
This year's This Is the Week That Is: More Political Humor for the Holidays features more current events satire (the news, a la The Daily Show and SNL's Weekend Update, is most of Act II) with a quick protest song retrospective (an uneasy mix of satire and homage).
A few ideas make a welcome return from last year's production: Dave Jadico's hilarious "man on the street" interview and the transformation of an audience volunteer into a presidential candidate, as well as Childs' South Philly pundit Patsy, who steals the show via video.
"It was more a mom decision than anything else," says Childs about not performing live. She missed tucking in 4-year-old Lily Kate during this fall's long run of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. With husband Scott Greer performing in This is the Week, Childs taped Patsy venturing to City Hall and Washington, D.C., to ask big-name politicos, "Should our next president be funny?" The results are priceless.
TW3, as it was known during its original run as a TV show on BBC in the '60s, succeeds partly because the returning cast works so well together: Greer and Jadico are joined by fellow ComedySportz vets Tony Braithwaite (whose impressions of Chris Matthews, Jimmy Carter and many others are hilariously accurate), Steven Wright and newcomer Mary Carpenter. Erik Ebbenga joins as music director and accompanist, and everyone receives writing credit.
"I take the helm as in 'this is the structure' and 'this is what I want to include,'" Childs explains, "but in terms of creating each piece, every cast member weighs in," along with assistant director Don Montrey and stage manager Tom Shotkin.
The company has honed the frequent updates to a fine art, considering fresh ideas for the opening song and news sections daily, then using the pre-show warm-up to incorporate new material. "It's often too early to do things on the day," Childs points out, "because people haven't heard about it [yet]. Sometimes people don't have the knowledge to laugh, or we don't know how a situation will play out."
TW3 offers laughs aplenty — little stinging or surprising, but all smart and current (the Michael Nutter jokes foretell Philadelphia's next four years) — but the evening's finest moment is a re-creation of bare-hand puppetry by Burr Tillstrom (Kukla, Fran and Ollie) about the Berlin Wall. His Emmy Award-winning "hand ballet," beautifully performed by Jadico, was first performed on the BBC show.
For a holiday show, it never focuses much on the actual holidays, but "Christmas is back in a little this year," Childs notes. "Our nod to this time of year in general is about nostalgia, family and memories. For us, this show has become that ritual. It's great to come together every year to create comedy."
This Is the Week That Is
Through Jan. 13
1812 Productions
The Adrienne Theatre, 2030 Sansom St. 215-592-9560, 1812productions.org
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