The Fringe -- Good Cast Keeps `Kazoo!' Humming

The 1999 Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival began Thursday, and our reviewers have been roaming Capitol Hill to sample some of the 71 shows playing at 10 venues through March 21.

For a full schedule, map, and other details, and for information on ordering festival tickets in advance or purchasing them in person, call the Central Box Office at 206-322-2018, or drop by the Broadway Performance Hall, Broadway and East Pike Street.

"KAZOO! 4-play," KAZOO!, Broadway Performance Hall.

This is unusually strong sketch comedy - witty, wise, weird. The writing is pointed, and deft comic actors execute with spectacular precision.

Even when Brian Wennerlind's writing slips, the cast is gifted enough to score points. A good example is the sketch imagining a singing girl and her guitar-playing dad entertaining an NRA meeting. The song "God Is in America" starts off with sharp irony, then takes a gross nosedive (incest joke). Still, Gordon Todd plays it well and Ingrid Ingerson is a funny ingenue.

The best of the 20 skits are comic gold. Smoke Altman and Teniea Sandlin reflect our coarse, youth-dominated culture with an expletive-laced "Romeo and Juliet" takeout. In another sketch, Sandlin and Ingerson are terrific as kids mixing MTV-talk and intellectual ponderings. ("The unexplored life is so totally not worth living.")

Wennerlind is a freakishly funny performer - catching incredibly long tosses of candy in his mouth while delivering a monologue.

"Nnnnn!" is a hysterically impossible game show and "Typographical Theatre" - a bad typist's courtroom drama - just keeps getting funnier and funnier, a fitting climax for an outstanding show.

Friday at 8:30 p.m., Saturday at noon.