November 19, 2007
SNL does its best show in years
The reason it was so good? Because I couldn't watch it. The show's been shut down due to the writers strike, of course, so the cast and whatever's left of the crew put on a stage version of it at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Chelsea:
"We're like cranky trained monkeys if we don’t get to perform," said Amy Poehler, who is also founder of the theater. "We all thought about what we’re going to do during the strike, and because we have no other skills, we just scraped this together."
Fun idea, but there were two big drawbacks: 1) The audience couldn't use their DVR remotes to skip past the boring parts (all but the first minute of most of the sketches, and every single minute of the rest of the sketches); 2) Horatio Sanz performed.
On the bright side, proceeds from the 200-seat performance went to the 90% of the production staff who just got laid off. Kind of like, I don't know, the Yankees going on strike and then putting on a charity softball game for the stadium staff. (The Yankees are baseball, right?)
http://blowingsmokethemovie.com/cgi-bin/mt-app/mt-tb.cgi/2018
I saw the Upright folks perform some of their street theatre while on a visit to NYC many years ago - pretty hilarious. And their short - lived show on Comedy Central ("Exit O?") way back when was pretty good as well.
Comment by Dmac on November 19, 2007 8:58 AM
Quick Jim, whip up a couple skits about C-SPAN hosts los it and Antiques Roadshow bloopers and yer in!
Comment by J Wilson on November 23, 2007 3:10 PM



