THEATER REVIEW : New Firesign Show Seems Out of Touch With Times

You had to be there.

That is, if you’re a Firesign Theatre fan, you had to stand in line for a very long time outside the Wiltern during a ticketing snafu, and then struggle to get inside for your beloved comedy team’s final one-night stop on its 25th anniversary reunion tour. If you claimed to be a member’s talent manager--and why doubt such a claim from the tall gentleman waving credentials--you got in after shouting, “At first I thought it was a Firesign joke, making people line up outside for a half hour and creating craziness, but it’s gone on too long. It’s no longer funny.”

Once inside, the self-christened “Fireheads” donned red rubber noses and squeezed rubber bathtub toys that filled the cavernous space with squeaks.

“Who am us, anyway?” cried Firesign’s four founders--Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman.

Who am they? After debuting in 1966 on radio station KPFK as Radio Free Oz, the quartet’s collaborations became Firesign Theatre. The name was chosen in part because each member is an Aries--a Zodiac fire sign. The group’s “cosmic” comedy--anarchic, intellectual parodies--creatively expanded radio’s borders, echoing the decade’s mind-altering “head trips.” Thirteen years ago, after numerous “movies-for-your-mind” albums, the burned-out team broke up.

Sunday night reprised their best-known and best-loved pieces. Act I consisted of excerpts from their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger,” and “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once (When You’re Not Anywhere at All).” Act II reprised segments from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” and “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.”

But all was not just nostalgia. The quartet added references to President Clinton, Lyle Menendez, car-jackings, gun control, and Bosnia. A sobering, chilling segment included an updated “Beat the Reaper” game show parody in which a Dr. Benway injects “the mother of all viruses” into a contestant’s rectum. After a decade of AIDS-related deaths, the revamped 1960s satire seemed out of touch with the 1990s. So did a politically incorrect sketch about the Mexican Air Force flying marijuana across the border.

“What kind of a chump do you take me for?”

“FIRST CLASS!” the Firesign fans responded, rising in a standing ovation. “Bravo!”

Were these aging “Fireheads” the equivalent of silver-haired Rocky Horror Picture Show fans? If you didn’t know the secret handshake, you weren’t going to understand the arcane references.

Maybe you had to be them.