30 skits in 60 minutes… Go!
In 2000, I saw a great Fringe show in Montreal called “Mad Dash”. Amy Barratt of the Mirror described it like this:
You’ve gotta love the concept: in Mad Dash, playing at Geordie space, one of the performers calls in a pizza order at the top of the show. Then, they send a runner off to pick up the pie and the company tries to get through an hour-long show before he returns. The scenes in Mad Dash are performed in a random order determined by the audience (30 titles are posted on the set and the audience calls out one at a time). The scenes are all short, and mostly funny with a sprinkling of poignancy. Many of the quieter moments contain a message about stopping to smell the roses, a message which is undermined by the race-against-time structure of the show. I’m not sure what to make of Mad Dash, but I admire it.
“Mad Dash” was the work of (then) Concordia Students Joe Cobden, Sarah Blumel, Ken MacKenzie and René Primeau, and it was great. The sketches were funny or interesting, and often both. The frantic energy of trying to perform 30 sketches in 60 minutes had the audience rooting for the performers–yes! you can do this, guys!
A couple of weekends ago while in Manhattan, I caught “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” at The Belt Theatre. On their website, they describe their show like this:
Too Much Light…, with its ever-changing “menu,” is an attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. [...] Each short play is written by a performer, honed by the ensemble, and randomly collaged with twenty-nine other plays through high-energy audience participation. Each week, these plays shift as ensemble members add new plays to the existing body of work.
Sound familiar?
Because I enjoyed “Mad Dash” so much, I figured I’d check this out. It turns out “Too Much Light…” is in its sixteenth year in Chicago and third (w/ hiatus) in New York, but I don’t know if the makers of “Mad Dash” drew inspiration from “Too Much Light…” or not. “Too Much Light…” does a few things differently. For starters, new plays are added each week (the audience rolls a die to see how many) and others are dropped off. I’m not sure how this is arbitrated, but one would hope that plays are kept in a process similar to 1000 Blank White Cards. On their website, the players also post some of their sketches, like this one: “The Neo-Futurists Present: How To Make a Baby”.
I loved the concept; it was even more ambitious than “Mad Dash”. The cast of “Too Much Light…” also had a lot of energy. But when push came to shove, the show just wasn’t that funny. There was no way around it–most of the skits were in fact pretentious, um, crap. Their website admits as much with further passages like:
The single unifying element of these plays is that they are performed from a perspective of absolute honesty. We always appear as ourselves on stage, speaking directly from our personal experiences. [...] Each night of performance, we create an unreproducable [sic] living newspaper collage of the comic and tragic, the political and personal, and the visceral and experimental.
I’ll admit that it was equal parts comic, tragic, political, personal, visceral and experimental, so maybe 5 funny skits out of 30 was the intended effect. Why cut in on the visceral with yet more (yawn!) comedy. OK, now I’m just being an ass.
If their description of the show interests you, see it; if you’re looking for 30 funny skits in an hour, go back in time and see “Mad Dash”.
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By vinnyfrancois, December 18, 2004 @ 2:14 am
I used a Time Machine to go to 2000 but I also had to “jump from a plane” with a “pair of fuzzy dice”.
By Andor, September 25, 2006 @ 2:10 am
I love the NY Neo-Futurists! No, not all of their stuff is funny, but it’s not meant to be. In fact, some of the most touching moments I’ve ever seen on stage have been at a TMLMTBGB show.
By Geoff, September 30, 2006 @ 10:42 pm
Yes! Since I moved from NY last year, the only thing I miss is my monthly visit to Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.
By christine, November 15, 2006 @ 4:14 am
Um, TML has been here in Chicago for 18 years. I think Mad Dash stole the concept, pizza and all.