GROUNDLINGS SHOW : COMICS TAKE A BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY

Next to jazz, improvisational comedy is the most existential of performing arts forms. It requires capturing the right moment at the right moment, in a culmination of themes, energies, performer-audience sympathies and imagery that, like the mot juste, can’t be replicated with the same incisiveness once it’s come and gone.

That’s what we learned watching the Groundlings cavort at their 11th-anniversary show at the Beverly Theatre on Saturday night.

The anniversary was a busman’s holiday: Do a few turns, say hello to the folks out there, kid around, show them what we do, and hope it all goes on for another 11 years.

High spirits prevailed, and after a slow start the show picked up momentum as it went along. But it was apparent that once the Groundlings’ great nights of improvisational successes had been memorialized, something had been lost. Not their hectic, caught-on-the-fly look, but the deeper discovery of something seen the second or third time around.

Of the lengthy first part, only three of the 16 or so episodes held up: Tim Silva’s exuberant parody of the fatuous co-host of a grindingly dull Sunday TV talk show; Judy Toll, Stephen Hibbert and John Moody’s sendup of “Godspell� cast members who thought everything in that musical was le dernier cri, and John Paragon’s rich parody of that florid Latin romantic balladeer, Ramon Azteca.

The second half had a better focus, though some of the sketches were flat and truncated, such as “Luncheon at the Beverly� (a parody of highbrow radio talk shows) and the Fryes (the Texas milieu that has proved as successful with the Groundlings as it had with “The Carol Burnett Show� on TV).

But the very bizarre nine-member lineup of crazies in “People to People,� a player-audience improv sequence, was rich enough to last longer than it did (one of the panelists is a Wisconsin housewife who lost her only son to extraterrestrials), and the concluding segment, “The International Talk Show,� where an Israeli comedian gets into a serious contretemps with the German host over the Max Schmeling-Joe Louis rematch, represents one of the rare comedic forays anywhere into the quality of nationalistic characters rubbing up against each other.

Laraine Newman and Pat Morita came on in the course of the evening, not to perform but to make favorable comment. It was the nature of the occasion--cheers and not too heavy self-congratulation all around. The cast assembled on stage at the end to wave to the audience. It was a good party as such functions go, but you sensed that they would have been happier working out of their house on Melrose.