If their name is Big White Angels, then why did I feel like I was in hell?
OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a tad, but I was pretty bored by Michael O’Brien and Lyndsay Nicole Hailey’s performance.
The show started with some promise in its first pre-written sketch. Though it involved audience participation — something I dread — the act actually seemed like it was written just for a person like me. I won’t give away what it involved, but it had a twist that I liked. But the rest of the sketches (about a thousandaire, radio show hosts, and a wounded veteran and his wife) weren’t very funny.
Then the pair switched to the improv portion of their show. This is the first improv show I’ve been to where when the actors asked for audience suggestions, there weren’t a half-dozen immediate replies. They had to squeeze the concept of “victory” out of someone in the corner, and I’m not really sure they ever truly hit on that idea.
I had hope for this portion of Big White Angels, but I was still left unimpressed. O’Brien and Hailey went off in so many different directions that one never could really pick up where the other left off. They brought up Lost for no real reason then maybe a cheap topical laugh. At one point they got crass, but not in the good 40-Year-Old-Virgin way, but in a way that was just kind of tasteless.
I do believe the couple has promise and that it might still be worth catching their Sunday show. The two (but especially O’Brien) are good actors, and they have such great pedigrees that I know they must be funny people. They had one especially clever joke involving Theatre 99’s monster mural that was smarter than most of what they offered. If they would just keep to jokes like that, they’d actually have something good on their hands, instead of an act that made the family sitting behind me leave 10 minutes shy of the end.
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