Supernova Comedy Showcase Kicks off with a (Big) Bang

If you weren’t one of the few who chose to spend their Sunday evening at the Tally Ho Theater, you missed a trio of insane dummies and a long-form, improvisational riff about a female secondary sexual characteristic.

This weekend, the theater hosted the first Supernova Comedy Showcase, a festival that treated audiences to a variety of acts from April 1 – 3.

Theater owner David Wright said he considered this first entrée successful, and drew healthy crowds on the first two nights. On Saturday, theatergoers were willing to watch three separate acts, Off the Cuff, Victorious Secret and City Hall, and few left in between sets, Wright said.

He credited the variety of the acts to holding audience interest. Performers ranged from local favorites the Last Ham Standing, an improvisational comedy group, to City Hall, a sketch comedy troupe from New York City.

 “If you have something for everybody, that’s how you get repeat business,” he said.

 The crowd was “more intimate” on Sunday, but Wright said that was to be expected.

Sunday’s show began with DCUP, or the District of Columbia Unscripted Players, presenting its show, “Simons,” which features three identical ventriloquist dummies doing improvised scenes. These included “Rube Goldberg Crossword,” essentially an absurdist spelling bee; “Missing Letter,” in which performers can’t use words that have a specific letter in the scene; and the extremely short and disturbing “Mouse Traps,” in which one of the Simons was quickly incapacitated by trigger three of the aforementioned pest-control devices.

Cast member Jack Reda said the troupe has been performing together for about 10 years, and won the Best Sketch Performance Award at the 2007 Miami Improv Festival.

The second act of the night, ShawnMikael(s), featured Washington D.C.-based performers and improv instructors Shawn Westfall and Mikael Johnson, who built an entire improvised performance around the word “boobs” upon the suggestion of an audience member.

The single storyline meandered through a tortured 17-year-old high school student whose boyfriend willed her breasts to grow seemingly with the power of his teenage hormones, her friend’s lecherous father wanting to “recruit her” for a non-existent school track team, the accidental leaking of a photograph of her gargantuan breasts during a skype session and the destruction of an educator’s career after a principal seized a laptop and cell phone with the image. All characters were performed by Westfall and Johnson leaping back and forth on stage, changing voices and scenes at will.

Wright said he would eventually like to have live performances at the theater every Friday. He added that he hoped Supernova would continue to gain momentum and popularity, but he remained humble Sunday.

 “As far as dream acts, I’d love to get Jerry Seinfeld,” Wright said with a chuckle. “But I don’t know if it’s going to happen.”