First, a land acknowledgement:
The Edmonton Fringe takes place on
white man's land. This has always been white man's land, before his
arrival this was an empty continent filled with banished Mongolians who
achieved nothing other than stealing the untouched land from the
previous wave of untouching Mongolians. Everything great that has been
built on this land came from the white man, and his glory over it we
acknowledge here today.
As a reviewer, improv shows are notoriously difficult to write about. As I said years ago when I bit the bullet and actually attended "Die Nasty":
I never saw any of those things. There were no naked cannibals, no mentalist act, no Red Redford. Blinov wasn't there either. Neither of the major papers even review the show for pretty much this exact same reason. The things I liked and didn't like about this performance won't make much difference to you: again, I can't even talk about the performances since those keep changing. Will Morgan Cranny be making an appearance in your production? Probably not. Some of the characters are certainly semi-regular and recurring, but as a review this will be exactly that: a review of the specific set of circumstances I was there for. Tune in next week when I "review" the people walking past the patio at Julio's.
So when I got dragged to Agent Thunder this year, I knew going in that I couldn't do what I normally discuss in a review. I could discuss what specific jokes and gags the two lead actors -- Agent Michael Vetsch and Agent Matt Ness (both of their real names) -- did that worked well and which ones worked poorly. I could talk about which characters they did a good and/or bad job bringing to life. It ultimately wouldn't matter, though, since the show you could later see was nothing of the sort. So really all that's left is to review in a much wider and more general sense how the show went, with the notion that it might give you an impression on how the show would go in the future.
It's worth a quick notice that Agent Thunder had previously made an appearance at the 2019 Fringe, and that you can watch their shows on YouTube giving you another data point in what their show typically "does" and whether or not you'd enjoy it.
The first thing worth noting is that they really should consider breaking their show into two or maybe even three stories. The runtime isn't too long at 60 minutes, but seeing how its 60 minutes of improv with only two actors, they did have to drag some of the scenes and plot twists out longer than I would have liked. Two 30 minute shows probably would have kept a little more energy, but I suppose the concern is that if you see two missions featuring Agent Thunder you'd realize too quickly that the missions are kind of general templates with the details just rearranged here and there to set up the same basic action and story setpieces (which, in fairness, the post-Goldfinger Bond movies were equally guilty of doing and tried desperately to also keep you from noticing).
While I'm a little loathe to engage in it myself, this would increase the crowd participation which is a staple of improv and oddly missing from these shows: once the audience gives the initial noun-adjective combination that sets up the overall mission parameters, you're really just watching an unscripted on-the-fly narrative. While both actors at relatively decent at the improv thing, no audience participation leaves a bit of that meat still sitting on the bone.
It's clear as you watch it that Vetsch is better at coming up with new gags and plot developments on the fly than Ness is, so as a result the former "subs in" more often than the latter: the actors tap out and swap characters every time one of them stumbles and needs a mulligan, which helps keep the show from stalling as one actor has trouble improvising the next scene, but also makes it extremely difficult for the audience to keep track of who is whom and what precisely is going on. Wait, is Vetsch playing Thunder right now and Ness is the supervillain? Or was that what was happening before the most recent tapout?
That Vetsch, much larger than Ness, is able to pick up and carry him while Ness cannot do the reverse, means that in the numerous situations where that physical act is required, a tapout occurs immediately making the audience confusion even greater. Outside of the upper-body-strength imposed lifting and carrying sequences, the two actors do have a lot of experience and skill in the WWF-style action scenes (as featured in the trailer), which are a highlight of the show. If only their dual dialog and scenario generating skills were equally honed and coordinated, then Agent Thunder could really be an engaging and entertaining experience.
As it was, it was good but not great improv, though I overheard some rather enthusiastic endorsements from outside the show, so it seems to be a decent crowd-pleaser for the crowd I went with.
The one final note is while the sound engineer did seem to have a decent skill for finding and using special effects which were related to the improv scenarios which the actors found themselves engaged in, they also had a live musician on stage who really only served to block the sightlines of some of the crowd. If you aren't going to utilize a resource like that, why even bother?
Click here to go back to the 2023 Edmonton Fringe portal page.
