I have an innate aversion to one-person shows and I think this one just may have cured me?
Mark Vigeant stars in The Best Man Show, an improvised long-form comedy directed by Joanna Simmons. It is chock full of bold choices that aim to push the boundaries of what audience participation can be.
The premise is as straightforward as you can get; a best man speech for a brother’s wedding to two blushing brides. Over the course of the show, our protagonist slowly descends into madness and seeks a way out of his spiral.
Believe me when I say that every beat of this hilarious descent is earned.
This isn’t a five minute scene in which a character has a breakdown for the audience’s laughter. It’s a calculated, perfectly timed slide into insanity that convinces you this could really happen to anybody under the wrong pressures. Mark Vigeant plays Paul, an obnoxious centrist who doesn’t quite understand the concept of polyamory and believes it’s his duty to ridicule anything that doesn’t quite measure up to the life he envisions for himself. The more he insults the lifestyles of others, the more he realises that his apprehensions say more about his own relationships than they do about those he’s going after.
On its own, this would be a great improv show. Grabbing suggestions from the audience, building a best man’s speech off the back of them, and then concluding with a life lesson tying everything together. It’s got all the ingredients for a well structured, 45 minute show.
Yeeeeeeah, um, we’re not even at the best part yet.
In a similar vein to Austin Harrison’s Magnus Steele act, Vigeant calls upon the audience to engage in deeper interactions than merely shouting out non-geographical locations. Audience members are cast as family, brides, and friends, and repeatedly called upon to lightly play those roles. A man cast as ‘Cool Andrew’ is constantly referred back to for the purpose of affirming whatever crazy nonsense Paul is currently saying. A woman cast as Paul’s father is encouraged to express their anger and confusion at the newlyweds’ arrangement. It’s such a bold piece of audience participation and it pays off at every step.
To be honest, I would go as far as to say it’s mentalism. In order to pull off a show with this level of risk built in, you need to ensure that your audience is on board with you. There wasn’t a single dud in the crowd tonight and either it’s just a coincidence that everyone was game for his antics, or Vigeant is an expert at picking out audience members to be a part of his show. It’s just so satisfying to watch these people go from knowing nothing about the format, to being guided through his story. Vigeant subtly mines prompts from them with a combination of simple but direct questions that never result in that dreaded improv suggestion silence.
EDIT: In my post-midnight stupor of committing to review every show I watch on the night I review it, I slipped up and made a terrible omission. Of course, even the one-manest of one-man shows requires adequate support and director Joanna Simmons reaches far beyond that. Throughout the show, she acts as both tech support, time-keeper and popping DJ, all at once. She punctuates each segment of the show with impeccable timing and even when technical difficulties arise, she fixes them on the fly with an in-universe reason. The result is a fully immersive experience, curated by a director who’s as engaged with the content as the performer on stage is.
It’s shows like this that remind me that modern improv is still such a nascent genre and that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what this art form can become. The Best Man Show is the next frontier in audience participation and dares to be bold in a time where it’s so easy to be safe. It is phenomenally funny and I urge you not to jilt this man while you can see him in Wellington.
To the best man! 🥂
The Best Man Show is running from 7th of March to the 9th of March, 9pm at two/fiftyseven. Tickets available from the NZ Fringe website.
