Recap Flight Of The Conchords at Riverside Theater

When you see Flight Of The Conchords live and in person, you realize that Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement really are skilled musicians and songwriters, aping musical genres cleverly and without discrimination. You forget that they’re supposed to be woefully inept rock star wannabes. Without the magic of television, it would be hard to sit through nearly two hours of their songs if that were not the case.

The 7 p.m. Saturday show at The Riverside Theater opened with McKenzie and Clement dressed in low-budget, cardboard robot costumes, performing the high-energy “Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor.” That was it for theatrics until the encore, when the pair came back dressed in shiny Spandex for the psychedelic rock tune “Demon Woman.” In between, it was just the two of them—well, and cellist Nigel, who was introduced as The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra—playing a mix of standouts from their back catalog, including “The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)” and “Bowie,” and the newer cowboy yarn, “The Ballad Of Stana”—about a guy so bad he broke every law, including the law of physics. (“He would occupy the same physical space as another solid object. He didn’t give a shit.”) They capped the loose, intimate night by climbing off the stage and adopting spread-legged stances for “Sugalumps,” a song about how all the ladies like to get a peek at their packages. (“They look so good, that’s why I keep them in the front.”)

Having heard horror stories about the audience’s non-stop heckling during last year’s Flight Of The Conchords’ show at the Riverside, I prepared myself for the worst. Happily, it never got that bad; shouts of  “I love you Jemaine!” and “I love you Brett!” were as annoying as it got. Truth is, Milwaukee isn’t the only town with idiots who can’t shut up, and McKenzie and Clement have learned to handle it smoothly. “Why don’t you write us notes?” Clement suggested at one point. “You can use as many exclamation marks as you’d like.”

Opener Eugene Mirman, on the other hand, had to deal with lots of yakking through much of his 30 minute set. It was tough at times to focus on Mirman, but he still got laughs. (The biggest was from his declaration that “religion is not a leap of faith—it’s high-functioning autism.”) By the time he went into his hilarious diatribe against Delta Airlines, even passing out postcards for the audience to mail in to the company, the room had settled—and then it was over. If there was anything wrong with the evening, it was Mirman's short set, and that’s hardly a complaint at all.