Like the mom who automatically pops an extra tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls into the oven on Thanksgiving, the Brave New Workshop knows how to comfort you during a holiday season that brings on its stresses earlier every year. It dishes up a heaping portion of belly laughs that offer reassuring familiarity, if few surprises.
Despite the show's title, "Twerking Around the Christmas Tree," there's not an abundance of pelvic thrusting and shaking. In fact, you might find yourself wishing for a little more, particularly from that master of physical humor and crackerjack timing Lauren Anderson, who can cause a ripple of mirth to run through an audience by merely lifting a brow. Her castmates Melanie Wehrmacher, Andy Hilbrands and Bobby Gardner are able performers all, but at times seem to helplessly orbit Anderson's sun. The girl just can't help it.
A weak early skit about greeting cards ("guys love really long cards and lots of super-earnest words") spells doom, but the jokes and action step up after that. As usual, local-reference jokes are sprinkled throughout— snow emergencies, passive aggression, having an extremely white, white Christmas — with a special cameo this time that feasts on the travails of star Viking Adrian Peterson (who no one wants to see dressed as Santa Claus, so of course that's BNW's gift to us). Pop-culture topics du jour also are milked, including millennials' attitudes, and the new black "Annie" on Broadway, or "Blannie," as they dub it.
And once again for the finale, they roast their old chestnut, a rapid-fire "Twelve Days of Christmas" that has nothing whatever to do with partridges or turtle doves.
Saturday night's opening was lent an air of celebration by the dapper presence of that esteemed octogenarian impresario of high jinks himself, Dudley Riggs, who founded the company 55 years ago. He smiled equally regally at one-liners that ranged from "I feel like baby Jesus is mocking me" to "Stank you very much."
At "Twerking Around the Christmas Tree," you will hear no tongue-in-cheek references to themes explored by Molière, nor be treated to a sophisticated interpretation of Martha Graham's "Greek Cycle." The laughs are lowbrow and easy, and just like those crescent rolls, they hit the holiday spot.
Kristin Tillotson • 612-673-7046
