Be cheered

What cheers you up? Whether it’s a walk in the sunshine, a stiff drink, or YouTube videos of cute baby animals, I bet you think your prescription for cheer is really unique. 

Four Humors Thater is here to tell you you’re wrong. You’re no special cheer snowflake – in fact, when it comes to being cheered up, all of us are the same. Literally. As you take your seat for We Gotta Cheer Up Gary, your cheerologist host will give you a name tag so that you, Gary, will feel comfortable introducing yourself to Gary, Gary, Gary, and Gary, in the seats around you. 

You see, normally, the cheerology team provides one-on-one cheersultations, but because of a new administrative measure, the ratio is now down to three-on-fifty. Under threat of being fired by boss Gary (Dario Tangelson), the team of Gary, Gary, and Gary (Jason Ballweber, Ryan Lear, and Mike Fotis) have to cheer everyone up all at once.

You may be thinking that this is impossible because of how special you are, but it turns out there are a few things that are pretty universally cheerful: watching other people feel awkward, watching other people who are worse at their jobs than you are, and watching other people fall down. Oh yeah, and improvisation with a giant, floppy dildo. We Gotta Cheer Up Gary is a pretty great time.

(Be sure to reserve your tickets and come a bit early to get a good seat – the show is at the Southern, but in a cool twist, you are actually seated backstage. It creates a great connection between the performers and the audience, but it also means that there are fewer tickets available than you’d normally expect.)

Balanced comedy trio

I’m being a little cheeky, but this kind of comedy is truly a craft, and the cheerology team has fully mastered it. Ballweber is a king of prop comedy, whether with a series of clumsy magic tricks or a wayward umbrella, while Lear is all about the pratfalls, demonstrating a slew of different ways to get hurt. Fotis brings more verbal humor to the trio, with his need to appear professional while actually freaking out. The three actors balance each other’s skills perfectly, and they each have solo bits that highlight their comedic abilities.

Dario Tangelson plays a smaller role as the lead cheerologist, but he does it with just the kind of congenial menace that you’d expect from a workplace administrator. It’s a great counterbalance to the rest of the play’s antics, because while everything he says is ridiculous, he represents a real threat to the livelihoods of our intrepid cheer team.

You could read plenty of satire into the show’s premise. The idea of streamlining, constantly increasing productivity while maintaining quality, and having the threat of being fired hanging over your head is all too familiar for many of us, and all the Garys give us a chance to laugh at all the bureaucratic red tape without denying that the threat of downsizing really exists.

Do you want to go there?

And if you really want to go there, We Gotta Cheer Up Gary has some serious intellectual meat to it. The big question is, why do we constantly need to be cheered up in the first place? Yeah, OK, you see the show after a long work week, and you could use the Friday night pick-me-up. But it’s not just the audience that has to be cheerful in this show. Fotis’s character is constantly trying to put on a happy face (and hold in an aneurysm), and every time Lear gets hurt (which is a lot), he assures us not to worry – he’s OK, he’ll just walk it off. Even Ballweber, the silent one in the trio, gives off a sad clown vibe that makes us wonder if he’s just keeping his mouth shut to hold in his existential angst.

So beneath the slapstick and raunchy jokes are a bunch of regular Garys, with regular problems, doing the rather menial job of cheering people up. (And beneath that, of course, are a bunch of actors doing their own jobs, extremely well for probably less money than they deserve.) Put that way, it seems like the three Garys should either get together and unionize, or keep on faking a good attitude. This is a predicament we’re faced with all the time: get mad and make a change, or put on a happy face and pretend your problems don’t exist.

Heavy, huh?

It’s all there in the show… but really, don’t think too hard about this one. “We Gotta Cheer Up Gary” is an hour of easy, stress-free, well-executed comedy. It’ll cheer you up, guaranteed. Isn’t that what we all want?