Sketchiness pays off for ACME Players

By Recardo Baca
The Metropolitan

If sketch comedy is your bag, then the ACME Comedy Players are your kind of people.

Using a combination of dancing, improvisational skills, singing and acting, the group is on top of their game in their third revue, The Milestone Henge.

With most of the group members returning for another show, its solidity can be attributed to the castâs level of familiarity with each other.

Director Eric Farone created unique situations ÷ some similar with interconnecting themes throughout the performance, others with no relevance to the preceding and following actions ÷ but most were humorous in one
way or another. Ferone and his talented cast of seven wrote the material, including the three original songs.

One of the few scenes that isnât completely original was one of the best. Ferone staged a Morrissey/The Smiths-obsessed bachelor (Tim OâShea) taking a co-worker (Michelle Miracle) back to his apartment after a night on the town.

In no time at all, he has broken out his guitar and is warming her up with a couple Smithsâ favorites: ãHow Soon is Nowä and ãGirlfriend in a Coma.ä Finally, his lavishly worded original song is belted out in a great Morrissey-esque voice, but Miracle doesnât take to it very well as she runs away. Cheers to OâShea for his fantastic impersonation.

Another skit mocks weddings, commercialization and telethons, and features lounge singer Smiley Stevens (Jason Rudofsky) as he serenades an audience member with his crushed velvet rendition of Randy Travisâ ãForever and Ever, Amen.ä

Later, in the mock telethon skit, a Internet-obsessed computer geek squeaks about her Web page, which features wedding toasts. ãAt www.Toast.com,ä she says in a homely voice that rivals that of the late comic great Gilda Radner, ãthe wedding night should be like a good chicken dinner: a little bit of leg, a little bit of breast and a whole lot of stuffing!ä

Another skit, featuring all of the women in the group, is a time machine ride back to the pre-menstrual days of drinking Capri Sun. Times of tearing out and trading your Ricky Schroeder and Gary Coleman cut-outs from Teen Beat magazine and talking about the unnecessary use of brassieres when you hardly have any breasts to fill them.

Innocently thinking Marxist and martyr are synonyms isnât always funny, but these guys make it so.

Their line delivery cannot be replicated on paper, nor would I attempt to ruin their funniest premeditated moments. For example, a barber shop is having a slow day and one of the men says: ãWe havenât had a client in here since the dog was sleeping on a Sunday.ä

That was funny, right?

It doesnât come across well in print, but itâs guaranteed that youâll laugh at that line when you see this show.

Although at times the humor went straight over the audienceâs collaborative head, most of it was catchable. In a scene where brand new parents talked about how they named their son, the woman said, ãHe wanted to name him John Elway, but I said no sports names, and thatâs how we came up with Michael Dean Perry.ä

You could have heard an ant walk as the audience was clueless to the Broncosâ defensive lineman reference.
A strong effort results in an audience belly ache ÷ not from a bad burrito from Juanitaâs next door ÷ but from laughing so heartily.