Dasariski Press
DASARISKI BUSINESS
http://www.laweekly.com/2009-11-05/calendar/dasariski-business/
It begins with a suggestion from the audience, usually a lyric from a favorite song or poem. Then Dasariski is off performing 45 minutes of what can be aptly described as comedic improv brilliance. Dasariski is Robert Dassie, Craig Cackowski and Rich Talarico(The goofy sounding title is a combination of their last names). Don't expect Whose Line is it Anyway style of comedy. It's all about long-form improv. These guys create grounded, truthful, character-driven scenes on the spot that are far more inventive than the pandering, slapstick, jokey type of improv offered by less talented groups. A suggestion could be a line from Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," and immediately you could be watching three grade school aged girls combing each others hair while arguing about Supreme Court cases. By the end of the night, you'll wonder if it was truly made up or prewritten as some may falsely suggest. Thursdays, 10 p.m.
Comedy Show Review: Dasariski
http://laist.com/2009/12/05/comedy_show_review_dasariski.php
No one likes the word 'slow', right? Put 'slow' in front of 'drivers' or 'internet connection' or 'children' and absolutely no good can come of it. And 'slow improv'? If you've seen a handful of improvised comedy shows, you've probably fallen victim to a dullard that makes it feel like time has stopped. Slow improv isn't exactly what you're looking for. That is, unless you're Dasariski.
In fact, slow is just how iO West's premiere three man improv team, Dasariski, would like to take it. Good news if you're a nervous prom date, but not so hot for a Thursday night comedy audience hopped up on cheap PBRs from the bar. But if that's true, then why is the 10pm Thursday night slot so packed that people are sitting three abreast and every step deep on the large staircase adorning the western wall? Because Bob Dassie, Rich Talarico and Craig Cackowski (as in DASsie-talARIco-cackowSKI) know what you don't, idiot: slow doesn't mean bad. For Dasariski, slow can mean incredible.
What happens on those Thursday nights is truly a clinic for young comedy students eager to jump on stage and cram jokes down an audience's gullet. Scenes - sometimes 8, 10 minutes long - are built organically and honestly, with a focus on characters and relationships that allow the room to fall silent at times, without ever feeling uncomfortable. In fact, even in scenes of low (but focused) energy, the breathing beats add a tinge of tension that heightens the eventual joke. And rest assured, there are more than enough jokes.
On this night, the three men embark on a journey throughout Las Vegas. They begin as tourists with little to no street savvy who are quickly taken advantage of, and as the show goes on to span 45 minutes they toggle between the call girls of the Strip, the security men who protect the casinos, and a brief interlude with the hobo group that may or may not be behind the famed tiger attack on German magician Roy. The guys are so comfortable with each other and in their own skin that, especially in the security scenes, they allow pregnant pauses and quiet moments of agony to play as a fourth character, infusing each scene with a noble desperation that is so often lacking in the laff-a-minute shows around town.
I hope the men of Dasariski don't read this and secretly think I've just been calling them old for four paragraphs, because nothing could be further from the truth. Bob, Craig, and Rich play a deep-dish Chicago style of improv that has largely faded from the LA comedy landscape, and that is not a good thing. But regardless of their form or their feel, these men are outright hilarious. They accept every scene with a certain amount of mystification and candor, and thoroughly seem to enjoy the discoveries along the way. There are small bumps and hiccups, as in any show, but these men do more than pass them over with a frightened grin, they embrace them and use them to propel the show forward well past the line in the sand where other teams would have fallen in on themselves. They work hard, they play slow. They are Dasariski.
Out of Bounds Comedy Festival
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A841862
Success is now spelled O-O-B
The Out of Bounds Comedy Festival has come and gone, leaving in its wake a scattered community of local performers only now beginning to pay back their massive sleep debts. Seven nights of impromptu antics can take a toll on the most robust of humans, so we won't be surprised to see the Austin Improv Collective's Andy Crouch lurching zombielike across the cityscape or Kaci Beeler of Parallelogramophonograph crashed on a street-side bench, Available Cupholders' Ace Manning mumbling incoherently in an alleyway or Jason Vines of Improv for Evil in nothing but a frock coat, tied halfway up a lamppost. And you, Jeremy Lamb, OOB executive producer, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
This year's Out of Bounds comprised those seven nights, four venues, and more than 75 troupes from all over the country - and one from Australia. Your OOB news team, catching only 10 of the dozens of shows available, was impressed – by the constantly packed houses, the relative smoothness with which this vast machinery ran, the uncountable number of smiling faces in (and the easy camaraderie radiating from) the scene. And - by the shows themselves?
Well, look. Sturgeon's Law dictates that 90% of everything is crap. And OOB has doubled in size in recent years. Still, Sturgeon's Law was possibly turned inside out by this festival: Personal extrapolation and word of mouth suggest that 90% of it was anythingbutcrap.
Damn, we saw some terrific performances! Austin's ownConfidence Men, anchored by the Institution Theatre's Tom Booker and Asaf Ronen, was a nearly note-perfect rendition of David Mamet's staggering machine-gun dialogue and men-being-men posturing in a big-city aquarium; the show, a success overall, contained stretches where we had to remind ourselves, "No, it doesn't matter how fast they're going, how well the conversations are meshing, how fucking funny that one line was: These guys aremaking it all up as they go along." (See "Confidence Men/Start Trekkin'.") On the Spot, a troupe from Hawaii, slayed the audience with its silent-movie style improvisations, mugging and maneuvering like actors in some Mack Sennett reel, plying the physical comedy so well you'd think slapstick was a synonym for "sublime." The Knuckleball Now's show was its usual continual explosion of madly intersecting tangents, the ideas flying so fast and furious it was as though Michael D'Alonzo, Mike Joplin, Craig Kotfas, and Ace Manning were operating as one schizoid brain that had been in contact with Arthur C. Clarke's monolith.
Theatre artists Jenny Larson and Hannah Kenah brought their scripted show "Guest by Courtesy" to the Hideout; the extended skit ripped apart a contentious relationship between two cousins, with the humor and sheer physicality of the piece sufficient, we reckon, to overwhelm an entire parlor of Available Cupholders. Austin's Get Up started a night at the Independent in excellent long-form duo style, conjuring Norwegian and Russian seamen hunting a ghost whale to the bottom of the ocean and back. Impro Melbourne, from that island continent of Oz, added a couple of P-graphers to its wacky mix of scenes from a publishing house's slush pile. The amazing things that Scram from Minneapolis and Chicago did with structure would've confounded Tarantino. And the headlining pride of the festival, Cackowski and Talarico. Oy, Jesus, you can understand why these guys are professionals: Their long-form technique, smooth and deeply character-based, is unsurpassable.
If this is your first indication of what went down OOB-wise in Austin last week, we invite you to Google the festival's name and follow links to all the blogs and Flickr accounts that will be babbling about it for months to come. That way, friend, you'll know better what you missed. That way, you may decide to reserve your tickets for next year's Out of Bounds Comedy Festival now.
Improv That's Risky
Lynne Bronstein, Mirror Staff Writer
Santa Monica's theatre/club circuit has a new venue, The Westside Eclectic comedy club, which showcases stand-up comics, comedy groups and improv groups.
Go around to the alley behind the Third Street Promenade to find the entrance. The room is basic, walls painted in solid bright colors, matching folding chairs, with a low platform that serves as a stage. What transpires on stage is a kind of magic that requires the use of one's imagination but which can cause contagious giggling and guffawing.
A recent show at The Westside Eclectic featured two improv groups, Shiner and Dasariski. Opening act Shiner, a four-member group of Second City graduates, took the stage wearing identical black slacks and tops, the better to seem neutral as they played a plethora of characters.
The technique of most improv groups is to ask the audience for suggestions, and Shiner, having received the word "suspense" from an audience member, took this theme on a wild ride. It began with Shiner Jen Cain, who mimed a young woman sitting in a movie theatre gobbling on popcorn. "I'm not scared," she told her invisible boyfriend. Then Jennifer Marie Kelley took over, adding to Jen's premise with the young woman pushing away her boyfriend's sexual advances. Each member picked up the thread from the last performer, throwing in increasingly absurd twists and turns.
By the end of their 20-minute set, Shiner had morphed the premise into half-a-dozen interlocking skits involving rival mothers trying to swap babies, am immigrant tailor and his assimilated son, inept galley slaves, disgruntled customers at an Appleby's restaurant and even a back story explaining the origins of two characters in different skits. All four members of Shiner had boundless energy and the two males, Mark Galiardi and Hal Lublin, were expert at accents. Not every moment of their set succeeded in being knock-down funny (that's a liability of improv), but Shiner is definitely a group to watch.
Guest headlining for this night was Dasariski, an all-male trio from Chicago consisting of Bob Dassie, Rich Talirico and Craig Cakowski, whose combined credentials include Second City, the Improv Olympic, Mad-TV and SNL. Their name combines the first syllables of their last names but is also a pun on the onerous nature of their trade.
Like Shiner, Dasariski primed their set via an audience suggestion, in this case, a mere title: "The Fallen Woman." They turned it into a virtual one-act comic play about three brothers who visit their mother's grave. While this sketch provided plenty of laugh lines (sample line: when the brothers recall that their father wanted to "be a pirate" one brother muses, "Maybe he wanted to play baseball in Pittsburgh"), it also contained moments of real poignancy. One could see the characters growing and developing quirks and depth as the sketch progressed. This was something beyond improv, more like sudden theatre. Dasariski took the risk and won.