O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : Crazies Tackle Improv and Get Bruised

Steve Martin got it only half-right.

It’s not comedy in general that isn’t pretty. It’s improv comedy that isn’t pretty.

It is the cruelest taskmaster, a ruthless trapeze act for funny people making up characters and worlds on the spot. Making something, out of thin air and in an instant, that will make the rest of us laugh.

It is invent or die. Depending on the night of the week.

On a recent Friday, the Orange County Crazies’ new improv show, “T.G.I./Orange,” wasn’t a funeral, but it wasn’t pretty either.

Like a ballclub in a slump, once one player started missing, the rest followed. Next time, like the next game, it might be different.

This time, you yearned for the group’s bread-and-butter basics, which are witty lampoons of Orange County life. With “T.G.I.,” we might as well have been in Orange, N. J.

None of the dozen-plus situations set up by director Cherie Kerr touched upon the place that makes the O.C. Crazies the O.C. Crazies. One would hope that the group doesn’t need scripted dialogue to tell them where they are.

Interestingly, the best moments didn’t involve dialogue at all, but silences and sounds. It begins with something called “object transformation,” in which the 11 members of the company line up, each miming an object and passing it to the next person, who takes the object and mimes it into a different object. It produced a funny kind of alchemy.

The show ended with a Crazies staple: Kerr conducting the group in a “symphony” of sounds, each chosen on the spot. It went on a bit long, but it’s something I’ve seen no other comedy-improv group attempt.

Unfortunately for the audience, most of this show, in its conception, doesn’t play to the group’s strengths. On the other hand, although watching comics exercise undeveloped muscles isn’t always fun, it’s wonderful for the comics.

Bits such as the overused “mood changes,” in which members of the audience call out for actors to be “paranoid” or “joyful,” begin to resemble stupid pet tricks. But it must be a good acting exercise.

Then there are the bits that are basic situations--say, a bunch of guys (there aren’t many women in this group) standing at the edge of a Hawaiian volcano talking in French. Do it again, Kerr instructs, only fast-forward. Then again, only in reverse slow-motion.

This last feat wows the audience, because this group is very good at it. But they’re not good rescuing scenes running out of gas, such as a bit in which they improvise new endings for the movies “The African Queen,” “Basic Instinct” and “The Wizard of Oz,” or a belabored bit with Hansel and Gretel in downtown L.A. (Why not downtown Santa Ana?)

No one in the cast of Toni Ala, Jim Andritch, Nick Coletto, Patty De Baun, Drake Doremus, Rich Flin, January Gordon, Eric Halasz, Robert Morris, Steve Ruddell and Russell Towne stood out as an outstanding improviser, although Towne displayed a global range of dialects.

The improv may not have been pretty, but it also wasn’t helped by Michael Bacich’s curiously erratic musical support. An improv scene that dies needs the backup musician to pump up the volume and get us--quickly--to the next scene. Bacich often just let the scenes flounder in silence.

* “T.G.I./Orange,” Pacific Symphony Center, 115 E. Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana. Final performance, June 4, 8 p.m. $10-$12. (714) 550-9900. Running time: 2 hours.