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Ninja Brian, a.k.a Brian Wecht, stood on the stage of Cafe Nine Monday night without uttering a single word, communicating with the audience only through a poorly constructed PowerPoint presentation, bodily gestures, and flashing eyes. “Hello,” the first card read, as if warming up the crowd. A few other typical pleasantries followed. Then: “I will kill you all after the show.” The full house assembled for the show dissolved in laughter.
Ninja Brian was the putative host of Ninja Brian’s All Star Variety Spectacular, a true-to-its-name variety show that descended on the Elm City’s beloved club on State and Crown featuring Wecht along with musicians Jim Roach, George Hrab, Sam Griffin, and Steve Poissant in a series of acts that ran the gamut from fractured children’s music to silent standup to songs from video games to smooth jazz.
One reason why the house may have been full on a Monday night, however, is because Ninja Brian is one half of the musical comedy duo Ninja Sex Party, the comedy duo of Wecht and Dan Avidan, whose alter ego is Danny Sexbang, a thoroughly oversexed, supremely overconfident would-be lothario and Jewish superhero. Over 13 years, through a series of songs, videos, and concerts, Ninja Sex Party has built the kind of following that has them selling out the big halls they’ve booked on their current cross-country tour. But as Wecht explained at the beginning of the show, built into his contract for this tour was that he got to stage a variety show in smaller clubs on the tour’s off nights — in other words, to do whatever he wanted.
What that meant, for Wecht, was a night that combined mighty doses of comedy and musicianship — and a crowd that arrived early and stayed until the end, laughing the whole way.
The show began with a set from Go Banana Go!, a kids’ music project with Wecht and musician, songwriter, and producer Jim Roach. Wecht and Roach met while working together on a Ninja Sex Party record, and, as Roach explained, they both discovered that they constantly made up ridiculous songs for their children while they were around the house. These became the seeds for Go Banana Go! and an album’s worth of material, Dark Side of the Banana.
The more adult-oriented version of the material ranged from lyrically dense numbers about the adventures of people both named Mark and Mark to a country song about what it’s like to deal with an excited monkey who enjoys throwing his own feces (see video). To close out their set, they turned to a cover of a song from Smart Kids, a 1986 album by none other than MacGruff the Crime Dog. As Roach explained before they began, “these songs are designed to keep kids off drugs, yet no song details how to do drugs more than these songs do.” As they launched into “Cocaine and Crack,” the laughter built to the chorus, released more fully when Wecht, without missing a beat, said, “once again, this is a real song.” Go Banana Go! set the tone for the acts that followed.
George Hrab performed a solo set of original songs that used rapid-fire lyrical, melodic, and harmonic ideas to hold forth on topics from myth debunking to a catalog of true exploits from the fabled aggregate news subject Florida Man (with the sobering thought to “please remember that my vote counts as much as yours — maybe more”) to a song about what it is to not be famous.
Wecht then took the stage as the silent character Ninja Brian, and performed an entirely wordless stand-up routine that had the audience laughing pretty much the entire time through his set. Who knew that so many jokes could be pulled out of a crude PowerPoint presentation?
Some of the comedy came from his sudden, overt threats to the audience. But much of the comedy pulled from the simple idea that stand-up comedy, robbed of the ability to speak or make facial expressions, can fail spectacularly.
There were the segments in which Ninja Brian did fabulous non-impressions of Robert DeNiro and “Shawn Connelly.” There were the segments in which he attempted to do improv by taking cues from the audience — cues which he obviously couldn’t develop. The shtick culminated in a ventriloquism act, in which Wecht manipulated a doll of himself silently in front of the microphone. Absurdities piled on top of absurdities. The audience loved it.
Super Guitar Bros — Sam Griffin and Steve Poissant — took the stage as an acoustic guitar duo doing video game music interspersed with intentionally awkward banter that kept the audience loose between songs. The musicianship on display, however, was no joke. Griffin and Poissant proved to be tight, dextrous guitarists, flying through fast, complex figures with apparent ease. They showed, first, that one doesn’t have to take oneself all that seriously to be a serious musician, and second (if there were any doubters left out there), that video game music has become one of the most imaginative arenas for music composition and performance around, burning through and mashing together styles and genres at a furious pace, with many, many compositions losing none of their excitement when taken out of the game — even if some of the melodies were liable to stir deep memories of hours of delirious button-mashing in front of a screen.
“Hello,” Wecht said, returning to stage in a different costume altogether. “My name is Trey Magnifique, and I create and curate smooth jazz experiences … it’s a thrill to be here in Connecticut, the original flyover state, in the city of New Haven, a city so smooth you can’t say it without saying ‘hey.’ ”
So Wecht’s second alter ego launched into a short set of smooth jazz originals that were as funny as they were quite credible as smooth jazz numbers. It was all smooth enough that it was hard to appreciate the tightrope he was walking. He poked fun at the genre and musicians in general, as when Magnifique plugged the merch table with a soft-spoken relentlessness that grew funnier each time he did it. At the same time, there was no doubting Wecht’s commitment to the musical side of things, the seriousness with which he took writing and playing music, even as his intention was partially to play it for laughs. It all worked. When he invited the rest of the crew back on stage to perform George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” as a final number, the crowd cheered for more.
“There will be no encores,” Wecht said. Everyone laughed. But there weren’t.
