The Twenty Sided Tavern, inspired by Hasbro’s tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, isn’t easy to categorize. It’s a combination of comedy, mystery, improv, and puzzle, and at times it looks and sounds like a television game show.
There have been many memorable productions at the Irish Rep over the years—of Beckett, Synge, Friel, O’Casey, McPherson, and more—but with Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, it’s clear that the venerable nonprofit theater has a robust and self-deprecating sense of humor, able to laugh about the dominant tropes of Irish drama and the innumerable depictions of trauma and strife. Smyth’s play, developed under the theater’s New Play Development initiative and directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey, who leads that initiative, is a departure from its typical fare: a funny, satirical exploration of Irish theater, stories, and cultural identity.
“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”
Written in 2000 and inspired by the Y2K scare, Eric Bogosian’s dark apocalyptic play Humpty Dumpty is finally receiving its New York premiere after debuting at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., in 2002. At that time, Bogosian’s script included dialogue that eerily foreshadowed the September 11 attacks. Now it serves as a cautionary tale about mankind’s dependence on technology.
In Two Minds is a new Irish play about the way a mother and daughter's intimate relationship is tested by mental illness. Playwright Joanne Ryan has constructed a story in which a mother’s behavior, resulting from bipolar disorder, tests her daughter’s resolve, love and support. Daughter (the characters are unnamed) knows she has little control to prevent her mother’s descent into depression, like watching a sinking ship. The play presents two portraits of the bipolar’s emotional toll compassionately but accurately. It is gritty and unflinching.
By now, we are all too familiar with the many stories of teen shootings and high school rampages. And though each story is as sobering as the one before it, when it comes to dramatizations of such events, audiences have now reached the point where they recognize the formula
Outside the impossibly small box office/lobby of Performance Space 122 is a swarm of hipster 30-year-olds blocking the sidewalk, trying to get in to see Mike Albo's much-anticipated third solo show, My Price Point. PS 122 is usually a draw on its own, being the historical stamping ground for solo performers like Karen Finlay and the late, great Spalding Gray. But adding to the frenzy is the critical buzz about this self-confessed "D-list" celebrity. Angry East Villagers pass remarks as they try to squeeze through the loud and shivering downtown-theater crowd. Once seated in the packed theater on the second floor, one is immediately excited by Jeremy Chernick's inspiring set. We see an urban apartment with steel file cabinets, a desk, lamps, chairs, and even a gray metal locker. Lining the back of the stage are a bunch of Adidas trainer shoes, in soldier-like rows. There are red laces in each shoe, which stretch to a single point in the center of the ceiling, looking like the crimson rays of some sort of apocalyptic sun. A "Tsunami Relief" can on one of the desks furthers the tone of impending disaster. We also see a cowboy hat perched on top of the locker, reminding us all too well of the George "Dubya" political machine.
A cheer starts to rise from the audience as a precocious-looking Albo struts purposefully to the center of the stage with a large, novelty-size book by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. He is clad in an Adidas warm-up suit. He begins to talk to the crowd in an infomercial style: "This is your world, the way you want to see it, based on a number of studies and polls. You have 'fear,' but no Fear Factor. You prefer Taye Digs in more comedic roles. You enjoy low-cost stars like David Spade and Mariska Hargitay. I am pregnant with a tumor filled with Splenda. I feel like the entire world's set on Vibrate."
Albo proceeds to take shots at pop icons like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and US Weekly. Also, overhyped and corporatized celebrities, ribbons for AIDS, breast cancer, "Support Our Troops," Lance Armstrong, celebrity religions, pashmina scarves, "princess shoes," trucker hats, yoga, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, chihuahuas, babies, updating your Internet profile on friend networks like Friendster, and going to tanning salons. In essence, a culture that has defined itself by its gross consumerism, celebrity obsession, and a broken moral compass. Narcissism is America's drug of choice, and Albo takes a kind of melancholy glee in being just another blissfully ignorant user.
One of the more interesting themes that he explores is a culture of being tired. Why are we always so tired? Our day could be as indulgent as going to a spa and shopping, and yet the first words out of our mouths when we run into a friend are "I'm soooo tired." Albo also addresses the trendy American pill epidemic. After he descends into a coughing fit, he apologizes, saying, "I'm sorry, I have acid reflux. I was taking Nexium and Prilosec OTC, but now I'm on something totally better."
He continues with a laundry list of over-the-counter and non-over-the-counter drugs that have become household names thanks to Pfizer and the rest of the corporate medical industry. Medical placebos are big business in a country that is riddled with self-doubt and self-obsession. Albo also discusses the razor-sharp, fast-paced New York real estate scene, with its corporate and celebrity buy-ups of all remaining affordable residential housing: "As a broker, I get money from your account every time you desire a sense of home."
But some of Albo's and co-writer Virginia Heffernan's material misses the mark. A bit about being in Maui when he heard that the tsunami hit South Asia falls flat. The tsunami could have been a very interesting way to comment on a post-9/11 landscape of international disasters that have brought the world together. Instead, this is where some of the show's stories come off a little like pages out of Albo's pink sequin-studded diary and are not as important as he thought they were when he was being passed a joint on the Maui beaches. A bit as J.Lo's personal assistant is kind of old news. Her clothing line and multiple marriages have been beaten to death at this point, and the material lacks freshness.
David Schweizer is an undoubtedly masterful director, having collaborated on Rinde Eckert's deeply moving solo show called And God Created Great Whales. Unfortunately, I did not feel the same presence in this show. It is noticeable with the transitions and musical breaks. Cary Curran's dance numbers are really fun but don't reappear as consistently as one might prefer. They are usually the show's high points, where the audience is taken on more of a journey.
One of the most important rules of solo performance of this kind is that the characters need to be distinctive. Unfortunately, most of the characters sound and act the same. Ultimately, the question arises, Is this theater? Though extremely charming and witty, Albo doesn't have the theatrical gravity of solo performers like John Leguizamo or Billy Crystal. There's no real emotional catharsis. Nor does he have the poetic storytelling delivery that put Spalding Gray on the cultural map.
My Price Point is self-referential and fun, winking at the audience about the fact that even this show was sponsored (by Adidas). But overall, the production just does not yield much fresh and thought-provoking insight, not to mention that at times the material comes off like "so five minutes ago." One wants Albo to really go for a higher lesson, but the show does not support something so dramatic. The problem is, this is the theater. That's the whole darn point.
Have you ever sat down to watch an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the comedy-improv TV show hosted by Drew Carey? Ever thought to yourself, "Hey! That looks easy. Bet I could do it"? If so, then head on down to New York Comedy Club for a taste of The Grown-Ups Playground, a comedy show that proves just how difficult good improv can be. Playground is both misconceived and poorly executed. The skits are performed by a well-meaning, energetic cast, but the games are inherently dull and do not encourage comedy of any kind. For example, toward the end of the night a selection of improvisers played a game that resembled the old television show To Tell the Truth. Six actors stood in a line onstage, all pretending that they had once worked as a guard at an ice skating rink. Only one of them, in fact, was telling the truth, and it was up to the audience to guess which one.
The M.C., whose drawn-out explanations were duller than a slow day on C-Span, told the audience to think of questions they might like to ask the actors about the job. She then proceeded to ask the entire group the same painfully boring question, going down the line and eliciting boring answers in response. The audience was then asked to vote for the cast member they thought was telling the truth.
But wait! What happened to the funny questions the audience was asked to provide? I wondered. Alas, this was merely a red herring, something meant to keep our minds occupied during the excruciating execution of this "comedic" game.
To the cast members' credit, they seem to be utterly enjoying themselves, and they provide much-needed encouragement when their teammates are onstage. However, this support system positively crumbles in the large group skits, during which the players' lack of training is extremely evident. All of the cardinal rules of comedy improv are thrown out the window, and the result is an unstructured mess. In the final game of the night, "Styles," five actors perform a neutral scene, then are asked to freeze. They continue the scene in a different style
The good news about Texas Homos is that it isn't as bad as it sounds. The bad news is that it is not even within spittin
We all deserve to be remembered, and Lisa D
It is the sad case that works of art that would otherwise move us are greatly reduced in their ability to do so because of their earnestness to do so. The latest example of this is the Oberon Theatre Ensemble
Pyretown tells the story of the romance between a divorced mother and a young man in a wheelchair. The play
They met at an open call in Las Vegas for the 80's Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Starlight Express. He was wearing a metallic cat suit and says that she was "a vision in gold lame." Twelve and a half years later, the duo has come straight from their stint as nightly performers at the Bonne Chance Lounge in the San Remo Hotel and Casino to New York to headline in A Touch of Vegas. Trent and Trudy Lee, the fictional creation of Kyle Barisich and Genna Ambateilos, are the stars of this Vegas-style parody playing at the Dominion Theater. Though the set is simple
Wasted has a fabulous concept. There is a nameless genre of theater I am fond of, in which a show presents a condensed version of a huge topic, like the history of America or lessons in Western literature. Wasted is subtitled The History of Public Education in the United States and How It Got That Way, which heightened my expectations. I guess that was my mistake.
Playwright Michael Goodfriend, working from a concept by Jim Niesen and the Irondale Ensemble, constructed his play as a film noir. The beginning introduces us to private detective Sam Slate, who is hired to find Jimmy, a missing schoolboy, and investigate the ominous Big Red Schoolhouse.
Private detective? Missing people? Ominous? Huh?
It was a trick, you see. In the subtitle, the word "history" is crossed out, and "mystery" is substituted instead. In fact, Wasted matches the plot of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep pretty much point for point, right down to the retired military man who is the detective's client and the blond femme fatale.
So Sam Slate asks some questions around the Big Red Schoolhouse, which is actually a bizarre mishmash of every education figure and concept of the last century. John Dewey, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, is there, along with teachers from segregated classrooms and the author of the "Dick and Jane" readers. Heck, there's even a phrenologist.
There are villains, too, who usually represent businessmen who have sinister intentions toward the school and mutter ominous phrases like "No child left behind!" while cackling with glee. (I couldn't tell you what their intentions are, because they're never really made clear
Cellphones, the new rock musical written and directed by Sesame Street veteran William Electric Black, claims that it is "the only show in town where they ask you to turn your cellphone ON!" Now strictly speaking, this is true. The performance opens with a jazzy number titled "Turn Your Cellphone On." However, this song was preceded by several emphatic announcements that the audience's cell phones should, in fact, be turned off. This contradiction exemplifies the internal struggle that forced Cellphones to waver between a merely pleasant show and a really engaging piece of theater. While the production's use of audience participation and its tongue-in-cheek approach to its topical content (the war in Iraq, the Internet, and pornography, to name but a few subjects) encouraged an unusual or even subversive theatrical experience, ultimately Cellphones was not willing to accept the risks that come with such boundary breaking.
The story is concerned with 11 strangers who show up at dawn to a new Department of Homeland Security recruiting booth opening in Central Park. They each want a job protecting our country, but for various unpatriotic reasons: a teenager is running away from home, another girl just wants to be famous, and someone else simply wants a gun. As they wait for the booth to open, the strangers "rock out" about current issues, both of the political and pop-culture variety. The songs are fun in a candy-coated way, and the music jumps adroitly between styles, from salsa to 50's to revival gospel.
The cast is wildly energetic and displays its vocal talents with great aplomb. Although some songs drag as a result of too much formulaic repetition, Black and his collaborators (Joel Diamond, music, and Matt Williams, choreography) should be commended for allowing the multifaceted cast
Love, they say, is a many-splendored thing. Love is patient, love is kind. Love means never having to say you're sorry, love is as much a light as a flame. There is no shortage of definitions for love, but The Bitterness of the Meringue, the new show at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, proposes a few more. Love is "a tortuous word." It is a "round business," it is where "everybody loses out." It is "vertigo at the abyss." Love is also, if I understood the play right, "salt that seems sweet, sweet that seems salt
You know you are in for a more unsettling type of comedy when the plot's kickoff is an AIDS-afflicted heroin addict jabbing a 7-year-old girl with a contaminated needle. Even more unsettling is that you find yourself laughing at this. But such is the infectious way of Jamie Linley's Dirty Works, Stiff Upper Lip's sophomore effort now playing at the Greenwich Street Theatre. In a kind of British answer to Trainspotting, Linley takes us to the heart of a London slum and a small crew of nobodies eking out their short lives through a haze of petty crime, promiscuity, and all manner of intoxicants
"You know me
Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock once said about his craft, "Cinema is life with the dull bits cut out." Playwright Jonathan Calindas, author of The Magnificent Mr. Vincent, playing at the John Houseman Theatre Studio A, has created a play illustrating the flip side of that quote. Cuchipinoy Productions, a fresh, new theater company founded in 2002 by Rutgers graduates, has taken a great risk in producing a work that spotlights a dull character with a boring life. Their heart is in the right place, and there are real truths to be found within this jumble of random scenes, irrelevant characters, pointless monologues, and mind-numbing dialogue. You just have to look hard for it.
The main character, Vincent, is anything but magnificent. He is a Rutgers college student majoring in computer science, even though he later confesses that the thought of having a computer-related job is depressing. One day he writes a song, sings it at a college hangout, gets a standing ovation, and decides he wants to be a famous songwriter.
He does not change his major in college, does not pursue a musical career, and confesses that he's never really in the mood to write music. Yet he spends the next two years of his life obsessing over the need to write a second song as good as his first. When he graduates from college, he immediately gets a high-paying job working with computers, which, as he predicted, makes him suicidal with grief.
Here the play strikes its strongest chords of truth. Before the reality of a 9 to 5, windowless-office job sinks in, the bright-eyed college grad falls in love with his cubicle, office supplies, and company voice mail. He speaks in front of CEOs in conference rooms and is astounded to earn their respect. His best friend and former band drummer, Jack, also finds success as a businessman and gives a dead-on accurate monologue about the horrors of a New Jersey Transit commute. These are the moments where the story shines. Slowly, the college dreams of rock stardom fade away as cold reality replaces them.
But after this, the story loses its footing. Woven throughout the story is an excessive number of monologues that are wordy and unnecessary. Often they describe pivotal plot moments that should be seen in action. When Vincent matter-of-factly recounts these moments after they have happened, they do not feel important.
To make matters worse, the dialogue spoken between the characters is frustratingly bland. Vincent's conversations with friends sound like this: "How are you?" "Good. And you?" "Good." "Really?" "Yeah." "Good to hear." These slow-paced conversations, stuffed with pregnant pauses between the words, often last for an entire scene before dramatically fading to black, as if something extremely important has just been said.
The focus of this two-hour-and-20-minute play is solely on Vincent. Unfortunately, he spends his days sitting miserably in either a park or office and having idle chats with friends and co-workers. For this reason, he is not an interesting character to watch or listen to.
Even worse, he often admits to not being as passionate about making music as he is about receiving the fame and adoration that come with it. Because he is not a famous songwriter who is written about in Rolling Stone, he declares his musical pursuits worthless. His whiny, passive course of inaction cuts through the heart of this play's central conflict. If he doesn't care enough to even try for his dreams, what makes his story worth hearing?
However, this is not to say the actors and production staff did not do the best they could with the material. This troupe of young Rutgers alumni all majored in some form of theater arts and immediately started pursuing their dreams within their field upon graduation. That in itself is praiseworthy, and their effort to get this play off the ground is commendable. I hope for their success much more than I do for Mr. Vincent's.
I don't care how cold it is outside. You need to get onto a train and travel to Williamsburg, Brooklyn (otherwise known as the Fourth Dimension), and go see Bizarre Science Fantasy, which is playing at the Brick Theater until Feb. 5. Yes, I know the city is covered in a blanket of unforgiving snow and you can see icicles forming in your breath with every exhale. Those excuses for not leaving the house and seeing this wonderful piece of theater are not good enough. Inside the cozy, brick-lined black-box walls you will be offered a bottle of beer or a glass of whiskey before being whisked away to a place where your darkest nightmares become real.
Under the direction (and
Theater fans with a taste for the irreverent, or those merely suffering from a short attention span, may find the perfect elixir with Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, playing every weekend at the Belt Theatre. Baby, billed as the brainchild of Gregg Allen, is written, directed, and performed by the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago group represented here by a talented sextet of performers able to balance repertory and improvisatory demands on a weekly basis. They create 30 independent vignettes to be performed in the space of one hour, with the order set at the audience's discretion. There's nothing scientific or even artistic to the scene selection. The Neo-Futurists hand out a list of scenes, and audience members shout out the scene number based primarily on the titles in front of them. In 36 weeks, the cast has performed nearly 300 mini-plays.
Some scenes work better than others, which makes sense given that a number of them come and go on a weekly basis. "F****n' Hat," for example, is a surprisingly meaty scene, with Desiree Burch pontificating on negotiating love and sex. Most scenes are much lighter, however: "Small Furry Animals Present: 'Closer' " allows the cast to re-enact the current Mike Nichols movie using stuffed animals. "Deja Smurf," the scene the audience chose to follow it, had the Neo-Futurists replay the previous scene while two cast members applied blue face makeup. "Shot in the Dark" has Burch reading a name out of the phone book and questioning aloud whether that person is in the audience.
And then there are many scenes that involve no dialogue at all, presumably to ease the cast's memorization demands. "The Critique" featured Justin Tolley seated onstage wearing a pair of eye goggles while a tomato sat on a chair across the stage. Tolley waited and waited for an audience member to fling the tomato his way. Finally, someone did. This type of sketch makes for cutesy filler, but says very little. What, exactly, is the subject of the critique?
Another sketch, "Deconstruction of the 80s Family," has the cast replicating the opening credits of TV's Family Ties, with one family member at a time being removed from the picture. That's nice and nostalgic, but pretty facile material. Of course, at times Baby gets even more prurient than that; the evening also included references to male genitalia and even a flasher.
On the other hand, given its premise, there is no reason to take Baby too seriously. But one can't shake the feeling that the cast is trying way too hard to be edgy when they are far better at being tongue-in-cheek rather than hip. Sarah Levy, in particular, stands out. She is reminiscent of Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose (but as a brunette) and is equally mercurial. Regie Cabico demonstrates a wonderful degree of physical comedy, and while Michael Cyril Creighton and Molly Flynn lacked similar scenes in which to show off, they complemented the ensemble nicely.
It is unfair to form much of an opinion based on a single night's viewing of Baby, as its experimental nature will always make it seem like a work-in-progress. And while the Neo-Futurists provide an evening that is more diverting than truly memorable, they definitely should be given a chance to continue. The Belt Theatre becomes a restaurant in several weeks, leaving the show in need of a new home. I certainly hope that it finds one, as it would be unfair to let this light go out.
Who would have ever imagined that knitting could be so symbolic of the trials and tribulations of growing older, finding love, and discovering happiness? That the scores of women (and even some men) who regularly attend knitting circles are metaphorically stitching through their frustrations and disappointments in the hopes of creating a wondrous new scarf
As long as I have lived in New York City, I have made a yearly pilgrimage to St. Mark's Church, ascending the stairs to Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysterical Theatre. I make my way across the dense jungle of folding chairs and spectators, and eagerly await for the sheepish, exhausted-looking Foreman to sit in his wooden throne among the audience and hunch over his soundboard to begin the performance. Every year, I am treated to Foreman's chaotic worlds, ones that reflect the dissonance and violence of the psyche, but remain incredibly lyrical as well. Alarms, demonic voices, and woodblocks ring in my ears, and the ever-present lights pointed at the audience force me to squint to see the grave tableau of bodies onstage.
There was a different sort of anticipation this year, however. Foreman's newest piece, The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), may also be his last. Two weeks ago, Foreman told The Village Voice, "I've always claimed that I have a love-hate relationship to the theater. And it's reached a point where I think this is the last sort of play like this that I'll be doing." It appears as though, after 37 years, Foreman is packing up the soundboard.
Needless to say, this will color anyone's impression of The Gods Are Pounding My Head!, and appropriately so. In addition to the stock themes of sex, death, and artistic drive, among others, Foreman has given us two of his most stirring characters to date in the form of two lumberjacks (brilliantly played by Jay Smith and T. Ryder Smith), who struggle with the forging of their own identities and legacy in the face of a world that encourages "pancake people"
The WOW Caf
I squeezed my way around the throngs of twentysomethings that had bottlenecked the path to the West Village bar, waiting to order their drinks in what they thought was only the line. Bumping into tables, stepping on shoes, I slowly traversed the packed floor of Junno's. I crossed over the makeshift stage: a lone microphone standing in a spotlight in a three-foot-square area at the back of the club. Elbowing my way to the bar, I signaled the bartender and took in my surroundings. This certainly was not an ordinary theater space. The press release I had been issued included only marginal information about the show, followed by a two-page, mostly incoherent, rambling story having something to do with fruit salad, Donald Rumsfeld playing Atari, and a Fanta being confiscated by the Secret Service. This certainly was not an ordinary show.
I thought that I was prepared for Deep Dish Cabaret. I thought that I was ready for anything. I was wrong.
The first performer of the evening was Stacy Nightmare (played by Karen Snyder), whose appearance lived up to her moniker. A wig (or was that actually her hair?) rested not-quite-right on her head. She wore glasses with fake eyes painted on them. And where her hands should have been, there were...lobster claws. She waddled up to the microphone and began delivering uncomfortably personal anecdotes about her sex life in a voice that sounded as if she was a love child born from the loins of Gilbert Godfried and Fran Drescher.
Though funny from start to finish, the high point of Stacy's set came as she was forced to take off her lobster claws so she could thumb through a collection of homemade Valentine's Day cards that were extremely vulgar, mildly psychotic, and absolutely hilarious. And yet, as offensive as Stacy Nightmare could have been, her routine had a very honest, self-deprecatory tone that kept the performer constantly in the audience's favor.
Jennifer Demeritt changed the show's atmosphere by reading an essay about her secret life. Corporate-world queen by day, Demeritt lets her bad side out to play a topless maid. Her essay provided a very interesting and stereotype-crushing (if not sometimes unfocused) dissection of the power plays involved in not just naked cleaning but all sexual relationships.
Again shifting gears, Clint McCallum performed as Butcher Slim, a honky-tonk guitar slinger who found musical inspiration watching late-night Star Trek reruns, among other things.
Patrick Borelli rounded out the first act. A seasoned stand-up comedian who has appeared on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, he found humor in the minutiae of life and expressed it in a decidedly non-Seinfeld-esque manner. Borelli seamlessly blended improvised riffs with rehearsed material. His story about wearing a red polo shirt to Staples and consequently having another customer confuse him for an employee had everybody in the bar laughing hysterically.
The second half of Deep Dish Cabaret moved away from straight comedy and into solo performance art, which was decidedly more funny and less serious than it may sound.
A man (and apparently a somewhat well-known performer) calling himself Zero Boy recounted an evening of yelling at his TV, drunken lust with a stranger, and nuclear apocalypse, using only vocal sound effects, hand gestures, and facial expressions. His was a truly unique form of storytelling.
Audrey Crabtree continued the show with a (literally) speechless performance of her own. As a shy librarian named Wednesday, she flirted with the boys and girls in the audience, bringing them up onstage to flirt and dance with her.
But words and noise came back to Deep Dish Cabaret with a vengeance as Eric Davis emerged onstage as Agent Whitbone, a Homeland Security Department agent who couldn't seem to keep his pants up. Garbed in costume wings and a clown's nose, Agent Whitbone tried his best to convince the audience to take him and his solutions to terrorism (which included balloons and yelling) seriously, with no success.
Rounding out the night was Neal Medlyn, who lip-synched a cheesy ballad before tearing off his clothes, jumping on a table, and screaming, "I ain't got no privates!" A one-trick pony, perhaps, but a decidedly funny one to witness.
The evening was emceed by Commander Leslie Gaye of the British Royal Marines. Though uncredited, I have strong reason to suspect he was actually producer Stephen Kosloff. Drink in hand, Gaye sometimes slowed the show down by rattling on a bit too long about nothing in particular. He also lost the Deep Dish Cabaret raffle prize, which sidetracked the action. He drew a few heckles from the drunk and unappreciative members of the audience, but I think he handled it all generally well, moving the show along without major incident and creating the fun and raucous atmosphere that the performers thrived upon.
All in all, I have to say that I would highly recommend Deep Dish Cabaret to anyone that enjoys being shoehorned into a crowded bar in order to drink excessively and laugh continuously at a variety of weird, loud, and debauched characters. However, if this sounds unappealing to you, I suggest you stay far, far away from the next monthly performance. Far, far away.
