Evening of Best Bits Is Way Off : Santa Ana troupe will have to do better than this comedy revue to compete with the O. C. Crazies.

SANTA ANA —  It’s a touchy subject, but a weekend visit to Way Off Broadway Playhouse, the aptly named theater-amid-the-warehouses, compels us to bring it up.

Life for theater artists in Orange County can be a real blessing, and not in the sense of the life behind “the Orange Curtain” that so many Angelenos perceive.

One person’s isolation can be another person’s safe harbor, a place to get one’s bearings away from the high-risk artistic battlegrounds.

Whether that will eventually benefit Way Off Broadway is impossible to know, but this much is clear: Being more than an hour’s drive time from the dog-eat-dog world of sketch and improv comedy theater in Los Angeles is a break for the theater’s Way Off Comedy Players. Were they, say, within earshot of Hollywood’s Melrose Avenue or North Hollywood’s Lankershim Boulevard, they’d be eaten alive.

What’s scariest about their new show is that it isn’t a new show at all, but dubbed--honestly--the “Way Off the Wall Comedy Nite VII Greatest Hits.” Director Tony Reverditto and company have reportedly culled three years’ worth of material. “The best classics,” says Reverditto in the show’s press release.

That’s the problem. This collection of 15 written skits, two improvs and music interludes and Steve McCammon’s brief stand-up bit could very well be Way Off’s “best,” but for the legions of live-comedy fans who graze comedy clubs and theaters, this new evening of old acts simply won’t cut it.

That includes fans of the other Santa Ana comedy group, the Orange County Crazies. But then, the Crazies would give the Groundlings, whence they came, a run for the money.

Perhaps the worst, and most tired, idea is to format the show like an evening of television. You know there are problems when the prelude and transition music--a wonderful soundtrack of TV show theme songs--is more evocative of TV’s guilty pleasure than anything happening on stage.

Not only are the clunky, awkward and long scene changes completely unlike TV’s high-speed rhythms, but very little in the scenes is like TV at all.

There are a couple of exceptions: a scene in which a lazy, unemployed husband is terrorized by the tube’s dreary, midday onslaught (played live within the frame of a TV set), and another titled “Flintstoners,” in which Fred, Wilma and pals puff doobies and jump each other’s bones (like the Crazies, the Way Offers have a taste for raunch).

Even these scenes, though, just lamely fade out rather than end with a punch.

Most bits begin with a zinger: Commercial lampoons such as “Divorcagram” or “Harry Pecker Jr. Insurance” or the most ambitious skit, Reverditto’s courtroom comedy, “She-Male.” This last bit instantly presents us with a gallery of goofy-looking characters that transcend stereotypes.

They get some mileage from the goofiness, but those bits lack any sense of ending. The pattern is of a lot of funny ideas on paper that haven’t been worked out in the playing, the difference between comic writing and comic theater.

Some ideas, such as the tasteless “Homo Shopping Club,” are just ugly: Gays are the last people who need a satiric nudge.

But because they’re away from the Hollywood comedy wars, this group can get by with such sloppiness--for now. Several individual players, including Shawn Smyth and Valerie J. Ludwig, give off a verve the rest of the show could use. But if the neighboring Crazies keep it up, the Way Offers will have a battle on their own turf.

‘Way Off the Wall Comedy Hits VII Greatest Hits’

A Way Off Broadway Playhouse production of the Way Off Comedy Players. Directed by Tony Reverditto. With Denison Glass, Kevin Ray Hayden, Godfrey Huguley, JoLynn Jones, Karen Kawolics, Janet Klein, Helen Lasater, Valerie J. Ludwig, Steve McCammon, David Alan Nelson, Reverditto, Raemi Rollins, Marnelle Ross, Jane Sharp, Shawn Smyth, Laura Spurlock, Ricci Thomas and Zee. Set design: Dave Carleen. Lighting design: Michelle Evans. At the Way Off Broadway Playhouse, 1058 E. 1st St., Santa Ana. Performances Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. $10. (714) 547-8997. Running time: 2 hours.