Presented by Eric Krebs and CTM Productions in association with Castle Talent, Inc., M. Kilburg Reedy, Spark Productions at the John Houseman Theater, 450 W. 42 St., NYC. Opened April 18 for an open run.
This show, by the strangely gifted performers who collectively call themselves Toxic Audio, is good-spirited, intermittently entertaining, but ultimately thin.
If you don't know, Toxic Audio consists of five actors, most of whom make instrumentlike sounds in proximity to microphones. As a result, the five play an instrumental tune with their mouths only, an odd phenomenon that they have extrapolated into this show, a series of skits, vignettes, and songs. There are audience participation bits, old songs from the '80s, and old-fashioned vaudeville-style skits, such as one where four of the five are annoyed at the antics of the fifth.
The novelty of the act carries the show for a while, but, in the end, all this has a somewhat irritating quality, though some of the audience granted the group a standing ovation at the curtain call. Though desperate to entertain, the show really has no script (the writers listed are three of the performers: Rene Ruiz, Paul Sperrazza, and Jeremy James). Toxic Audio would be better off if they deferred writing to a clever scribe who could turn their unique talents into something smart and coherent. Dated skits, even if performed by men who turn mouths into drums, are still dated skits.
The five performers are all very comfortable on stage and easily transition from comedy to music. Paul Sperrazza is probably the most distinctive, with his skinny, Jerry Lewis-like persona and his intense talents on the microphone. Rene Ruiz and Jeremy James display a bit more charm than Sperrazza without quite as much distinctiveness or comic inventiveness. The ladies, Shalisa James and Michelle Mailhot-Valines, are used more as singers to complement the proceedings.
Peter R. Feuchtwanger's scenic and lighting design, an amalgam of colorful lights and fog machines, is a somewhat appropriate frame for all this, though perhaps too derivative of teen musical acts.