ED
Nice guy, Ed. Smart as a whip. Funny as hell. Eight heads.
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The show I saw started with the audience suggesting a wedding. Ed put his heads together and came up with the saga of Angela and Jack, an unlikely but ardent pair who become affianced at first sight when Jack stops by the grocery where Angela reigns as the Aphrodite of the produce section, and shares some melon with her. Angela’s pure prole: the big-haired daughter of an electric-company meter reader–variously called Joe, Breenk, and (in his secret persona) Chad–whose obsession with power consumption leads him to install a gerbil-on-a-treadmill arrangement in the basement. Beautifying herself for the wedding, Angela gets a perm so huge it spills out through the sunroof of Jack’s car and catches flying objects.
Of course, I didn’t realize I’d been denied that scene until the next day. It’s not like I felt cheated at the time. What I felt at the time was that I’d seen a potentially brilliant show go a little out of whack and end up seeming merely extraordinary. Merely witty and energetic and fine.
Which is why it’s good to have a production like the one at the Apple Tree Theatre come along every so often. With a couple of musical-comedy troupers like Ross Lehman and James W. Sudik in the leads you get to see the Mr. Bones in Gogo, the Mr. Interlocutor in Didi. They’re Groucho and Harpo, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, even Fred and Ginger. Where the long-faced Godots enforce our sense of the bleakness around the characters, this one shows us the playfulness within them: the collusion that makes their unbearable world–well, not bearable, really, but at least a little funnier.
