Triple Espresso

Seven years, sixteen cities, and up to a million theatergoers later, Triple Espresso’s caffeine high refuses to wear off. This three-man vaudevillian cabaret act, in fact, is among the most successful shows our town’s ever produced, still getting sellout crowds night after night for the laugh-a-minute antics of the has-been trio Maxwell, Butternut, and Bean. What’s the big deal? Simply put, it really is that funny. Oh, sure, it’s theatrical comfort food, occasionally naughty but never crossing the line into grandma-shocking. But if it doesn’t ask you to think, it does ask you to laugh—and you will laugh. The plot is a piffle, really, a mere skeleton for the complementing talents of Espresso’s three originators—the wry, Newhartesque Bill Arnold and his mock-incompetent magician’s tricks, Michael Pearce Donley’s smarmy lounge-lizard, and the goofy dumb-guy antics of Bob Stromberg, whose inspired gorilla imitation is one of the show’s highlights. Next on the Espresso agenda is a full-scale European invasion, starting with Hamlet’s turf—three Danish actors just finished rehearsing here in Minneapolis and are set to open the first-ever foreign-language version of the show later this summer in Copenhagen. Music Box, 1407 Nicollet Ave., 612-874-1100, tripleespresso.com