When you go to an improv show, you’re there to laugh, but you’re also there to be surprised. Sure, funny plays can make you feel the rush of a perfectly timed joke. But only improvised comedy can jolt spontaneous, unplanned creation. It’s playwriting on the fly.
Who Did It? An Improvised Murder Mystery, now playing DC’s Capital Fringe Festival, vacillates between feeling like a funny play and feeling like a spontaneous creation. The jokes are solid and it’s narratively satisfying, but the performance doesn’t deliver many surprises the way the best improv shows do.
The show follows a tight structure. First, a “crime scene specialist” picks up three random objects from the audience. In my show, these were a bottle of sunscreen, a blue cocktail umbrella, and mint wax dental floss. Then, an actor dies onstage, so Erick Acuña and a fellow comedian play detective. Each following scene presents investigations of two suspects played by other improvisers.
Acuña is a witty comic, leading each scene and keeping the pace flowing naturally. At my performance, the jokes leaned toward the broad — Gen Z and consultants feel like pretty obvious targets for ribbing — but they still elicited recognition and chuckling. Some gestural physical comedy from the suspects drew some even bigger laughs.
What limits the show is the unmovable structure of scenes. I get it: limitations breed creativity, and formats help improvisers face the terror of a blank stage. But no matter what objects were chosen from the audience, the show would keep marching inexorably through each scene toward the reveal of the murderer. The best moment in the show came when Acuña dropped his straight man persona and launched into role-playing, forming a scene within the scene. It was a refreshing sharp left turn in an improv show that felt weirdly predetermined.
There are plenty of improv show structures like the Harold or the Armando that use narrative but leave more room for associative storytelling. Perhaps Acuña could expand the performance with those formats. Or maybe he could turn the show more into a funny play, providing a stronger characterization for his detective beyond his hints of a tragic backstory.
Still, one lukewarm performance doesn’t foreclose greatness for an improv show, particularly one with a rotating cast. Who Did It? has led to ecstatic reviews in the past, and I believe that with the right jokes and the right audience, it could deliver the laughs. Perhaps the show still has the capacity to surprise.
Running Time: 50 minutes
Genre: Comedy
Dates and Times:
- July 19 at 8:55 PM
- July 20 at 4:45 PM
- July 21 at 1:00 PM
Venue: Goldman Theater – Theater J
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Who Did It? An Improvised Musical
The complete 2024 Capital Fringe Festival schedule is online here.