The pretty boys reign supreme

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

It turned out to be a great showdown between the pretty boy belly dancers and the choo choo ballerinas – the much anticipated finale of Act Before You Think Season 2 had the audience in fits of riotous laughter with the theatre-games calling on the actors to deliver their creative best onstage. Starting off with the night with the three finalists, ‘The Ahindas’ were eliminated from the final, four theatre-games down the line, leaving it to ‘Garam Masala’ and ‘Dishum Dishum’ to battle it out to the end for the coveted title.  

With some assistance from the audience and a few scathing, yet accurate remarks from the judging panel of three, the two highly entertaining teams were neck to neck until the very end but ‘Garam Masala’ managed to rack up a few extra crucial points and were declared the winners of Act Before You Think Season 2.

The evening started with the ‘faster faster faster’ game, which called on the three teams to act out the same scenario first in 30 seconds, then 15 seconds and finally five seconds. The teams were given the scenarios ‘three little pigs,’ ‘Goldilocks and the three bears,’ and ‘three blind mice’ but the teams seemed somewhat confused and as the judges noted, did not seem to have much knowledge of nursery rhymes or fairytales.

However, the teams made up for this in the next game, ‘Broadway troupe’, which called for three members from the audience, who had to come up on stage and tell what their job was – each of the three teams then performed a song and dance routine about the job. The first audience member with his truly impressive occupation of ‘doing nothing much’ received an entertaining number from ‘Dishum Dishum’ as did the other two members of the audience from the next two teams. These teams seriously had their Jazz Hands down to a T at the end of that round.

The third theatre-game titled ‘home shopping channel’ really called on the teams to get their creative juices flowing. Each team was given a prop and was then given 10 seconds to demonstrate a use for it. The teams alternated every 10 seconds and each time, they had to demonstrate a new use for the prop. With the teams given a motorbike helmet, a water cooler bottle and a boot, they certainly managed to come up with some unique uses for the props. The helmet was transformed into a ball-guard and a looking glass amongst many other unusual uses, as was the bottle.

It was in this round that ‘The Ahindas’ fell behind, unable to switch as quickly as the other two teams and not making full use of the 10 seconds allocated to them during each turn.

Yet all three teams shone in the fourth round ‘helping hands’ in which a pair from each team took part, and with one acting as the other’s hands, had to act out scenes with the two emcees for the night.

The scenario was that it was a TV show and the helping hands duo were world-famous experts being interviewed while doing their jobs. The jobs: getting a massage, make up artist and making a cocktail. With the emcees getting into all the fun, the game proved to be hilarious with all three teams doing equally well.

At the end of this round, the marks were totalled and ‘The Ahindas’ were eliminated and the final round commenced with ‘Garam Masala’ and ‘Dishum Dishum.’ The final round in fact consisted of five more theatre-games much to the delight of the audience. Game one in the final round, ‘speed dating’ saw some extraordinary first dates with Dracula meet Snow White, Voldemort meet Maria from the Sound of Music, Catwoman meet Mr. Bean and Cruella de Vil meeting Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Except for some confusion where Cruella ended up meeting Scooby Doo instead, it proved to be an entertaining round.

‘Campaign time,’ the next game got into the spirit of the ongoing campaigning for the upcoming elections and with suggestions of election promises given by the audience, the ‘Pretty Boy Party’ and ‘Baka baka choo choo’  campaigned against each other and with both winning over the audience, made it a tight race indeed.

The games continued with hardly a break in-between, calling on the two teams to switch between characters rapidly over the next two games, one of which included a very memorable Bollywood moment courtesy of ‘Garam Masala.’

Fittingly, the final round proved to be the most entertaining: a dance off, where each team was given a different style every 15 seconds in which to perform a style given to them.  ‘Dishum Dishum’ pranced to a ballet, performed a rather unorthodox Kandyan dance, waltzed and finally got quite creative with the interpretive dance. ‘Garam Masala’ got their groove on with some great hip-hop moves, executed a somewhat loud tap dance and gyrated to a bewitching belly dance.

Although the judges quite rightly pointed out that the teams seemed to get their genres somewhat mixed up, they unanimously agreed that it was very entertaining. After the judges declared the final scores, the scores were all tallied up and ‘Garam Masala’ was declared the winner, amidst the applause and cheers of the full house that had turned up for the finale.

Pix by Kithsiri De Mel