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Robin Williams still delightfully manic
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Share on DiggWatching Robin Williams command the stage at Acme Comedy Company Tuesday night was like hearing the Rolling Stones tear it up in a neighborhood saloon or having Wolfgang Puck whip up a gourmet meal in your kitchen. It was intimate and spectacular.
Not that one of the world's most celebrated standups delivered a pitch-perfect show. He wasn't supposed to. His sold-out three-night stand in Minneapolis, which ends tonight, is a warm-up to a Las Vegas concert later this month, and he's trying out new material.
Williams has some real gems to deliver, many of which deal with technology: "We weren't online," he said, speaking for his generation. "We were doing lines."
The most promising new routine had to do with the creation of male genitalia, and while we can't go into detail, it's the funniest sex ed class you could hope to attend.
Williams turns 58 in July, but you wouldn't know it from this manic, breathless performance. He smoothly departed from his prepared act to riff with audience members in the 275-seat room, at one point getting a whole routine out of someone's baseball cap.
He did his classic bit on the invention of golf, but only at the request of an audience member and only because he seemed to have run out of fresh material and didn't want to leave the stage (He was slated to perform for 70 minutes. He went for two hours.)
This was not the Robin Williams who wins Oscars or sells out auditoriums; this was the Robin Williams who knows how to play to a small room. How fortunate we are that he picked one of ours.
NEAL JUSTIN
