Fender Bender

Anyone who’s lived in Nashville for a while knows how annoying it can be to listen to self-indulgent songwriters fill space talking about their lives. In the case of James and Morgan, both are on the draw at Warner Chappell Publishing, and their back-and-forth gab about co-writing sessions that never happen (“Heather’s always late”), inviting their song-plugger out for margaritas (“because he has the Warner Chappell credit card”), and getting enough action on a cut “to buy groceries” (Hard Knocks 101) came off mostly as disingenuous twaddle. The ladies played their instruments capably (piano and guitar, respectively), and both can definitely sing. Yet their songs are mostly bland Music Row pop-country—which means derivative music, semi-earnest emotional content, weak rhyming schemes and a dearth of soul.

The FuseBoxers struggled in the early going, as the source material proved hard to manage. A nice intermission video about the acting troupe’s personnel and goals had some style and comic spirit—thus elevating the mood—and the improvisers returned for a finale in which they seemed to throw off the chains of the song-based ideas sufficiently enough to get themselves into a more spontaneous and entertaining rhythm.

If it’s improv you’re attempting—and not just sketch comedy—it’s a risk not to allow the audience in on the fun by way of opening the scenes up to their suggestions. Needless to say, almost any random prompt from the gallery probably could have spurred FBX into more interesting improv than the limitations of the James-Morgan setups. The good news is that experiments always have value: You learn from them. The idea of merging improv with elements of Nashville’s music biz has potential, but the particular structure of Crash seemed to hamstring the thespians from the get-go.