Monday, June 8, 2009

A Review of 'Found': People Find Stuff. Now It's A Show

Thoroughly amused and entertained, I left the Actor's Playhouse in stitches after watching "Found: People Find Stuff, Now It's A Show". I was almost out of luck when I hit the Actor's Playhouse, just seconds away from the Christopher St/Sheridan Square 1 Train subway stop. I arrived late (no thanks to NJ Transit) and was told the event was sold out, but out of the corner of my eye I spotted one of the producers of this event and old high school friend Jason Dukes, who worked his producer magic and found me a seat.

I had previously attempted in trying to explain what the show was about, but after soaking it all in, here's what took place:

Twin projection screens display random 'finds' submitted to FOUND magazine through the years. For the sake of the show, the first item was a scribbling by a Justin Gotlieb titled "What I Know About US History". Apparently, in chronological order, he knows that Betsy Ross sewed the first American Flag, Christopher Columbus discovered America, Elvis Died, Jimi Hendrix died, Jim Morrison died, Paul McCartney was knighted, and Justin Gotlieb was born. This was set to the music of Eli Bolin, the musical head honcho for the night.

Other skits involved a ransom note found asking for $3.50 for the safe return of a binder,a woman wondering why the stripper she slept with is not returning her phone calls, A note from teachers to parents about fifth grade students being invited to a symphony but only letting certain students go due to 'the events that occurred during Johnny Tremain in January', which begged the question 'what exactly happened at Johnny Tremain?'

The final skit was a musical based on what Found magazine had called "The Mother of All Finds' which was a cassette labeled "Ypsilanti All-Starz', featuring 14, one-minute songs such as "Wave Yo Booty in the Air (Bounce), Booty Time, and Booty Shake (a capella). Needless to say it was a big hit with the audience.

Hopefully there will be some videos put up of this performance on YouTube, as words are hard to describe exactly how the Story Pirates pulled off so much from such a small amount of source material. I definitely recommend going to something like this again.

3 comments:

Stephanie Nikolopoulos said...

Booty time!

Anonymous said...

davy rothbart rules!!!!

Freddy Rodriguez said...

those 3 were the cleanest ones i could use. I dare not post what the other track names were!