Armando Diaz Experience, The

Improv, by its very nature, is risky. Even strong performers have good nights and bad ones.  The night I saw The Armando Diaz Experience, Theatrical Movement & Hootenanny was an off-night for what seems to be a good improv cast. Uninspired, the troupe fell back on subjects that bring easy laughs: B-movies and an audience's titillation with adolescent sex fixations. I guess it started with the audience's suggestion of a word to start the evening's monologue sequences, delivered by Armando Diaz (Miles Stroth) throughout the developing scenes - a sort of glue to hold the plot together, however loosely. The word was "toenails," but then Stroth launched into a compelling narrative of how he was laid up for a long time after an accident and couldn't reach his toenails (a bit of a stretch, but then who wants to spend an evening listening to narratives devoted solely to toenails?).

During his convalescence, Diaz's relatives always brought things to keep him occupied, including a lot of B-movies, which soon became an preoccupation. It's too bad the group doesn't take the monologue sequences and develop scenes around them; that way the story would be better, or at least more coherent, than unrelated scenes artificially linked.