How drunk to you have to get to enjoy The Imbible? Judging by the boisterous giggles coming from one particular corner of the room, whose denizens likely downed a few before even setting foot in New World Stages’s bar-cum-theater space, the answer is probably a boatload. For the rest of us, the promise of three watered-down (or, in one case, ginger-aled-down) beverages included in the ticket price of this lecture-with-music in no way compensates for the show’s amateurish and wildly unentertaining content. Yes, the facts about the history of beer, wine, gin, mead (water with fermented honey—who knew?), are dutifully enumerated, but they are also interrupted by the cast prettily performing a few too many barbershop quartet chestnuts and far too many micro-skits that wouldn’t make the cut on a Reduced Shakespeare Company blooper reel. Stitching this together is Imbible creator Anthony Caporale, who, as lecturer, employs the overeager sell of a brewery tour guide (understandable) and the self-congratulatory laugh of a teacher who thinks his jokes are funny and cares not whether his captive audience agrees. Happily I needed no recess bell to flee this sobering exercise, just intermission.
