The latest edition of Boom! An International Lost and Found Marching Band is a more refined ensemble than the version I caught a year ago at the 2008 Fringe Festival.
This most unusual music group is back for this year’s festival with a couple of new members and a more coherent narrative. Don’t get me wrong: It’s still a wacky bunch of actor/musicians who serve up a very eccentric brand of deadpan comedy.
The joke – or, if you prefer, concept – is that the band is made up of siblings, each of whom were abandoned in early childhood by their absent-minded parents and raised in far-flung corners of the world.
Founder and director Stephanie Roberts plays Lily, the Germanic ukulele-playing bandleader, the widow of a contortionist. Often she barks “Achtung” to signal a new marching pattern.
Boris (Daniel Eichenbaum), a clarinetist who rarely speaks and never removes his sunglasses, was raised in Romania and detained in Guantanamo by the C.I.A.
Neil (Peter Lawless), a saxophonist who also plays the melodica, was raised in New Zealand by the Maori.
Baloo (Heidi Van) was raised by whales off Nova Scotia. She’s a rapper.
Josie (Carla Noack), an Irish ping-pong champion, pounds the bass drum.
And Vinnie (Grant Prewitt), who was raised in New Jersey and once sold women’s shoes (dress casual only), plays the trombone.
Simply describing what this group does hardly conveys how strange and funny it is because so much of the humor is generated by the precise, idiosyncratic performances.
And if you ask yourself what it all means, you may come up with a very simple answer: Nothing. But this such an odd assortment of performers – each formidably gifted in his or her own way – that they do have a way of working their will on viewers.
Hours or perhaps days after the show you may find that Boom! has embedded itself in your memory banks. Once there, it never leaves.
Boom! performs at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 5 p.m. Friday; 11:30 p.m. Saturday; and 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Off Center Theatre in Crown Center. Tickets are $10 with a $5 festival button. Go to
www.kcfringe.org.
By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star