Emily Dorezas has felt the fear of improv, the “oh, no” anxiety close to the heart of off-the-cuff comedy.
Dorezas is a producer for Baby Wants Candy, which does long-form musical improvisation — at each show, the cast composes and performs a new 60-minute musical in response to a prompt from the audience. Dorezas has seen hundreds of these shows, the best of which are “like a magic trick.” She’s also been in the audience thinking, “Wow, this train is totally off the tracks.”
“And then all of a sudden, you’re like — I didn’t know there were tracks there! And now we’re going to the station,” she said. “They will go so far off where you think it could possibly go and somehow, some way, somebody will thread it back and it will go right to where it needs to be.”
Baby Wants Candy is among several acts Tim Sauers, Overture Center’s chief artistic experiences officer, caught at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. Overture will bring five of those acts to Madison for a kind of mini-Fringe running Friday through Sunday, Jan. 10-12.
Performances are designed for intimate audiences, with three shows in the Capitol Theater and a solo show in the Playhouse. The circus adventure troupe Brave Space, performing in the Overture Hall Main Lobby, is selling particularly fast. Ticket prices for various shows range from $30 to $55.
Brave Space, a circus troupe, performs in Overture Center’s Main Lobby, one of several acts from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Magic drag queens and ‘dirty Disney’
Kicking off Madison’s mini-Fringe will be The Kinsey Sicks, a San Francisco-based “dragappella” ensemble that last toured to Madison in 2013. Its show, “Deep Inside Tonight,” celebrates 30 years of over-the-top musical comedy in kitschy wigs, gloves and hair bows the size of basketballs.
“It’s brilliant to curate acts from the Fringe,” said Nathan Marken, a classically trained bass who stepped into the role of Winnie after founder Irwin Keller retired from The Kinsey Sicks in 2014.
“The thing about the Fringe, as exhausting as it is as a performer, is it’s such an opportunity to see so many different acts and so much talent in one spot, from all over the world,” Marken said.
“To curate acts … it’s going to bring in all sorts of new, creative ways of doing things maybe you never thought of doing before. As unique as we are, there’s a thousand other acts that are just as unique.”
The Kinsey Sicks traces its origins to a Bette Midler concert in 1993, when a group of friends went dressed as the Andrews Sisters. The group has played Las Vegas and off-Broadway, performing songs like “I Wanna Be a Republican.” A sample lyric: “Lower taxes are God’s plan/ global warming helps my tan/ Give a gun to every man/ to protect us from non-Aryans.”
The Fringe show kept to a tight hour and had more “naughty nursey rhymes and dirty Disney parodies,” Marken said. “Deep Inside Tonight” can go a little longer.
“We pay homage to a lot of the material that’s been developed over the years,” Marken said. “We have some new stuff in this show that is a big swing for us, and it is paying off.”
A recent review of the show name-checked tunes about dating (“Cruise People Uglier Than You”) and sex (“Somebody’s Crotch Over Me”), as well as an earnest parody of “Puff the Magic Dragon” called “Poof the Magic Drag Queen.”
“This is the next generation of The Kinsey Sicks,” Marken said. “The costumes have been refreshed. We’ve stepped up the effects.
“This is the first cast that’s had all professionally trained musicians, so it allows us to get away with more things when our material gets a little blue, or questionable. It’s a little more palatable because it’s so darn good.”
Chris Grace, center, performs with improv troupe Baby Wants Candy.
Solo show solves racism
The Edinburgh Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, and for performers like Chris Grace, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Grace played Jerry on the NBC sitcom “Superstore” and bills himself as “America’s 88th-most beloved Chinese actor.” He ran his one-man show, “Chris Grace as Scarlett Johansson,” at the Fringe for 27 days straight.
“The best thing about that was it told me, ‘OK, this part lags. This part I need to rewrite,’” said Grace, who’s based in southern California. “You can feel pacing problems. You can feel when people check out. And you can also feel the parts of it they’re really responding to, and even parts when you’re like, ‘I should extend this part, they’re really enjoying it.’
“It’s kind of like putting it in a lab, like one of those kits where you take rocks from the street and you tumble them until they get polished. That’s how it feels.”
Grace has described the show as “my exploration of everything I think about racism.” It references Johansson’s 2017 film, “Ghost in the Shell,” in which she plays a cyborg from a manga (Japanese graphic novel) series. Grace uses the format of self-referential comedy with threads of serious social critique, popularized in part by Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 special “Nanette.”
“About 27 minutes in I’ll be solving racism,” Grace promises during the intro. “Unfortunately, about six minutes after that I’ll be reinventing racism.”
Grace recently filmed “Chris Grace as Scarlett Johansson” for Dropout.tv, a reinvention of CollegeHumor. The show incorporates goofy asides and physical comedy, but it’s not just silly.
“Either the dumb bits are what buy you time so you can talk about more important things,” Grace said, “or you talk about more important things so you can hold people’s attention and do a bunch of dumb bits.”
Grace puts up the “Scarlett Johansson” show on Sunday, Jan. 12, at 2 p.m. following improv performances with Baby Wants Candy, of which he’s also a member. Baby Wants Candy maintains casts in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. The Madison performances will include people from each.
First up on Saturday, Jan. 11, at 5 p.m. is “Shamilton,” a fully improvised, 60-minute musical with the structure of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s mega-hit “Hamilton.” The audience picks a main character, like Dolly Parton, Dora the Explorer, Guy Fieri, Taylor Swift or Batman. Then the performers cast an Aaron Burr — Batman’s Burr/nemesis is The Joker, for example.
“Sometimes not the whole cast will know who was suggested,” said Dorezas, the producer. “They have to lean into the tidbits the audience has given them.”
At 8 p.m. Jan. 11, Baby Wants Candy does another improvised musical, this time without the “Hamilton” frame. Dorezas encourages Madison audiences to bring suggestions for titles but not to send them ahead of time; it spoils the fun.
“They will pick the first three they hear and have the audience vote on the title,” Dorezas said. “It’s all completely made up on the spot. Everything you see is made up — the story, the lyrics, the choreography. The intro is scripted but from that point on, no one knows what’s going to happen.”
For more information, show times and tickets, visit overture.org.
