News You Can Bruise for 2006 November 5

Permalink [Comments] (6) Sun Nov 05 2006 00:35 TMLMTBGB:

Aaron Swamp Swartz is in town staying with us, and we just went to see the Brendan-endorsed play "Too Much Light Makes the Baby go Blind", which is now also Leonard-endorsed. They have an hour to do 30 pieces of sketch comedy and sketch tragedy, ordered according to audience demand. Highlights included "Legoland Theater Presents: The Medieval Epic" and "Bite this, Reality!". Lowlights included preachy political Colbert Report ripoff. There is audience participation (one of my bugbears, or even owlbears), but it's easy to avoid by not sitting at the edges. Dadaism lives! Kind of. The group is called the Neo-Futurists but there was actually no Futurist content unless you count the idea of man as a slave to machinery (in this case the clock).

Also, almost everyone in the cast looked like someone else I'd already heard of. So you could pretend that the skits were being performed by an ensemble of Owen Wilson, Simon Pegg, Pauline Yates, Sumana's friend Steve Schultz, Aladdin Ullah from Uncle Morty's Dub Shack, and Jacquelyn, who I couldn't think of anyone she looks like.

Comments:

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Sun Nov 05 2006 05:01

When I went to it, it was merely Uncle Pedro-endorsed! I still have my TMLMTBGB t-shirt. We bought the CD, but they preferred to record the twee introspective philosophical ones more than the absurd hilarious ones so it really didn't work anywhere near as well as the live show.

This was probably about 5 years ago at the Chicago #tron-con, but it still sticks with me.

They roll 1D6 to determine your fee. I challenged my 5 by saying "double or nothin'!"

The guy blinked at me and said "Okay... If you want..."

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Sun Nov 05 2006 05:02

Oh yes, did they sell out/order out when you were there?

Posted by Leonard at Sun Nov 05 2006 08:44

They neither sold nor ordered out, unfortunately.

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Sun Nov 05 2006 14:14

When I went, they did. It was all just more performance art, really. They ordered one extra large pizza for the whole house, and held up the phone and asked the audience what toppings they wanted. At the end there was a single XL pizza carved into sixty tiny pieces, and covered in any topping you could care to name.

Posted by pedro at Sun Nov 05 2006 18:17

TMLMTBGB was started in Chicago -- it's one of the first things I went to when I moved there for college. Highly endorsed... I think they may have an SF troupe... or maybe did.

Posted by Brendan at Sun Nov 05 2006 18:25

By destiny, I was wearing my Too Much Light shirt yesterday. I'm glad you liked it.

Leave a comment