After several rounds of off-the-cuff comedy, light hearted competition and hearty laughter, the best three teams for the finals of ‘Act Before You Think’, conducted by the Mind Adventures Theatre Company, have at last been sieved through. The stage is now set for what is sure to be a keenly contested dramatic jostle between these immensely talented and fearless actors.
Last week, ‘The Wasps’ produced what was arguably one of the strongest all round performances in the competition so far to thwart their opponents, ‘The Lord of the Ping’, and book a place alongside ‘The Next Big Thing’ and ‘Osama’s Bush’.
The Wasps landed their first hilarious sting during the night’s opening game, which focused on a situation where a driver picks up three humorously afflicted hitchhikers. The driver displayed the shock and hilarity of his character’s situation quite superbly, effectively utilizing a host of comic gestures and mannerisms. His passengers, who suffered from Tourette Syndrome, constant spells of dry (ahem) hip vacillation and the inability to give people their personal space, each contributed in garnering the loud laughter that was now flowing freely throughout the Warehouse Project.
However, the Lord of The Ping (LOTP) did hit back with an equally inspired piece, where they had to act out the scene of a robbery, with the comedic bent being that it had to be performed in a completely operatic style.
The ad lib sing song dialogue eventually propelled the scene into a particularly guffaw inducing sequence, where both the burglar and the owner of the house confront each other with verses from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ( most recently Madonna’s) ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina’.
LOTP cleverly concluded the scene with one of its members substituting the line ‘Don’t keep your distance’ with ‘Why don’t you bugger off? ’.
Yet even this was not adequate to outdo what quite simply was an ingenious and unconstrained display from ‘The Wasps’.
The only instance when they did earn poor marks was when they had to portray a scene of a plane crash in the style of a Sinhalese teledrama. The Wasps’ Sean Amarasekera and Dominic Kellar admit as much saying, “We were just hoping and praying that nothing in Sinhala would come up because none of us are particularly good with it and what do you know!”
This however did not hinder their progress to the finals and they proceeded to hammer out performances that were becoming steadily funnier and drawing consistently louder applause from the sizable audience. Eventually judges Mohamed Adamally, Delon Weerasinghe and Ruwanthie de Chickera- who was playing the role of Simon Cowell for the night, once even dishing out a loudly booed one point for LOTP- had no choice but to award The Wasps a 124-109 victory.
Each of the last three teams are now geared up for the finals on November 5, with The Wasps revealing that they have stepped up their preparation to a level which Sylvester Stallone would be proud of.
“We are going through a very rigorous preparation. We get up early each morning and down a couple of raw eggs before jumping into our track suits and running several miles,” Sean expresses sarcastically. Gehan Dias from Osama’s Bush says that their preparation involves several warm up exercises but adds that his group has already come to the conclusion that there is no preparation one can go through for a competition such as this.
The Next Big Thing’s Dilsiri Welikala voices a similar view, adding,” In the few minutes you are given to prepare for each game, you basically don’t know what you are going to do, you just ask each other who can do what and play to your strengths.”
Both Ajith Ranasinghe from The Next Big Thing and Jehan Mendis of Osama’s Bush allude to the importance of such novel drama competitions as ‘Act Before You Think’. “It not only brings in a newer audience but it also exposes the talent of some actors who have never stepped on to the stage,” Ajith says.
Gehan and his teammate Asanga Warnasuriya speaking along these lines exert that some of the judges who regularly stage plays are going to look at some of the unheralded talent and earmark them as prospects for their dramas.
Opinions aside, all three teams are eager and ready for the finals this Friday from 8pm at the Warehouse Project down Tripoli road. To watch them go at it you can purchase a ticket from that venue or from Coco Veranda.
|
E-mail
