JAZZ FREDDY
at Live Bait Theater
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It was probably inevitable that someone would think of creating a dream team of the better improvisers in the city. It was not inevitable that a dream team would create great improvisations. When I used to hang out at the ImprovOlympic six years ago, the dream team Harold Be Thy Name–made up entirely of rising stars at Second City, among them Chris Barnes, Mark Beltzman, and Joel Murray–routinely created the most dismal improvisations. Everyone was so desperate for individual glory that they couldn’t work together as a team.
The folks in Jazz Freddy aren’t as interested in creating a single improvised play from this suggestion as the Free Associates (who improvise a new Tennessee Williams parody every week) or Annoyance Theatre’s Pup Tent Theatre (who create a new one-act as part of their show). But their seemingly random scenes do end up connecting. The strands of several stories–including one about a teenage girl’s dysfunctional family and another about the confusions that arise when a musician names his acoustical band S. Pistols–weave together by the third set of the show and create the semblance of closure. It helps that the company has a flair for creating believable, multifaceted characters.
Some of the sketches in this show, structured as a TV newsmagazine moderated by David Kraft, work quite well–notably a very funny jab at Dan Quayle, who’s judging a series of malaprop-filled essays, and an effective, surprisingly evenhanded montage of interviews with policemen describing what a riot looks like from behind a badge.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J. Alexander Newberry.
