SAY WHAT? A mime contestant. |
Purple splatter-paint graphics zoom over a flat-screen above the stage. Bubbly prime-time music picks up. Floating video clips start noodling around the screen, each presenting a man or woman making oddly deliberate hand gestures. All this is digital foreplay to the pilot of So You Think You Can Mime — the very clever episodic mixed-media centerpiece of this year’s genre-bending Winter Cabaret, at the Theater Project.
The Brunswick company’s annual answer to the post-holiday blahs — an evening of sketches performed by Theater Project regulars Keith Anctil, Craig Ela, Al Miller, Lee K. Paige, Wendy Poole, Christopher Price, Heather Weafer, and Michele Livermore Wigton — conjures the look of an echt cabaret. Lights are low. Tables are set with candles and flowers. Sexy red gels illuminate a svelte bald pianist (the smooth and pleasing Peter Dugas).
So it’s particularly, delightfully incongruous to be immediately plunged into the digitized, saccharine American Idol-style TV idiom of So You Think You Can Mime. In a pre-recorded video segment, our bright tool of a host, Bo Knottyoak (Anctil), roves with a microphone, interviewing a gaggle of would-be mime champions. Interviewing mimes, get it? From the get-go, the absurdity of the premise is a winner, and it only gets better. After a video montage of “The Audition,” the lights come up, Bo strides out, and we’ve magically become the live studio audience.
| Winter Cabaret | Presented by the Theater Project, in Brunswick | through February 10 | 207.729.8584 |
We meet the judges: leopard-print Daphne (Paige); Guillaume, an actual French mime (Miller); and his sometime lover/partner-in-mime Martine (Wigton). Then we meet the “mimalists” for that $78 prize and the gig at the Big Top Deli, who are over-the-top archetypes: There’s the classical French mime Varcel, sage and professional (Price). There’s the misunderstood punk grrl in the homemade “I’ll talk when you’ll listen” T-shirt, Soren Angstschreew (Weafer). Jane Plaine (Poole) is a nervous, sensitive claustrophobe who thinks miming will save her. And cowboy Roy Rogerstein (Ela) grew up on the ranch doing, um, lots of things with his hands in the barn. We return to them episode by episode over the course of the evening, in seamless alternation between video and stage action. They’re faced with two major events, the “Rope Challenge” and the “Box Challenge,” which whisk a little Fear Factor into the American Idol conceit. Between events, the contestants debrief emotionally on sofas.I’ve allowed the ongoing pursuit of America’s next top mime to dominate this review so far because it’s so damn good, but there are of course several other stand-alone skits interspersed through the installments. Some of these are hilarious and smartly conceived; a few are of a looser, goofier, more PBR kind of humor. Goofy: a stripped, spoken-word interpretation of “Stayin’ Alive” (have you ever actually listened to the lyrics?). Hilarious, although it probably won’t sound it: the Seussian tale (by which I mean told in rhymed couplets by a be-Truffula-ed female chorus) of a Las Vegas woman, Melissa (Poole), whose measurements are 36-22-85 (The 85 is the ass).
