A Long Time Coming: the Kids in the Hall at the Uptown Theater
By CHRIS PACKHAM

Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall performed a two-hour set of mostly new material last night at the Uptown Theater. At least, the only sketch I recognized from the TV series was the "Chicken Lady Phone Sex" sketch. A return to form for the Kids in the Hall, the show also hearkens to their roots working stages in small clubs when they were in their twenties.
Five guys, dozens of characters, zero sets. Well, how would you do it, Baby Genius? The show, Live As We'll Ever Be, is a revue of sketches, demanding dozens of locations which the group evoked via a formal theatrical technique called the Wondrous Magic of Imagination. Plus, they made clever use of a back-projected Powerpoint-y display to suggest locations and transitions, as well as a couple of taped sketches and live shots of the audience at the Uptown, about which MORE LATER.
In an enormously crowd-pleasing show that featured a super-powered drunk, gay stage kisses, one stage blow job, a time helmet and attempted statutory rape of a retarded teen girl with a soy candle, the group also revisited classic characters from the television series in new situations:
- Hello, Buddy Cole! Until I saw him, I had no idea how much I missed Scott Thompson's gracefully aging, martini-swilling raconteur, Charles Budderick Cole. He was absent even from the 1996 Brain Candy, the last major creative collaboration by the Kids in the Hall. Unencumbered by TV time restrictions, Thompson delivered a hilarious monologue postulating the homosexuality of Jesus with biblical citations and Andrew Lloyd Weber references that went on for, like, 10 minutes.
- Two missionaries, played by Dave Foley and my new best friend Kevin McDonald, knock on a suburban door and are greeted by Bruce McCulloch's Gavin, the loquacious and inventive 8-year-old. "Did you know? That if your mom dies? And you tell the bus driver? You can ride FOR FREE!"
- In the show's encore, Mr. Tyzik, arguably Mark McKinney's most popular character, came out brandishing a video camera and crushing the heads of audience members on the giant projection screen. As a finale, Mr.Tyzik crushed the heads of each individual member of the KITH after hurling some actually pretty dire personal and professional criticisms, including — in a Smeagol vs. Gollum internal struggle — at himself.
My favorite moment of the show occurred after some technical fuck-ups that interrupted a new sketch with Foley and McDonald, and fully encapsulates why the Kids in the Hall are so great: Sixty seconds after beginning the sketch, realizing an off-stage Scott Thompson's mic was still on, the two shouted at him, aborting the scene. "Too bad. It's really a great sketch," Foley said, laughing. Starting over, they redelivered the scene's opening dialogue at a double-time clip, arriving at their previous stopping point.
"And now, the premise," said Foley to the audience, and the ensuing scene was brilliant and surreal and totally hilarious. The two actors, who hadn't performed original material together since Brain Candy, delivered their lines with confidence and fun, as though the scene — like the group's professional collaboration — had proceeded uninterrupted. HEY! Look what I did there.









Saturday night, 

Comic actor Kevin McDonald began performing with Dave Foley as
• The Slap and Tickle gallery (504 East 18th Street, 816-716-5940), spiritual successor to the MoMo Gallery, hosts Erotica, its First Friday exhibit and party tonight at 6. Featured art includes work by local creators Dana Swedo-Bernal, Alan Winkler, Lori Raye Erickson, Jennifer Boe, and Slap and Tickle proprietress Apryl McAnerney. Live entertainment provided by St. Louis' Sturdy Gurlesque, Rita Brinkerhoff and singer Cheri Woods.
• The KC Fringe Festival’s Mardi Gras party starts tonight at 7 at Arts Incubator (113 West 18th Street). Tickets cost $20 for singles or $30 for couples and include drinks and food provided by Californos. The evening includes a variety of live entertainers in the mold of crazy things you’d see during carnivale season: jugglers, fire breathers, dancers and musicians. As a bonus, you won’t encounter the drunk frat boys and Girls Gone Wild video crews that migrate to the actual Mardi Gras each year.
Even though there are operatic songs about dining on human flesh, blood oddly seems at a premium in the play version. What, is fake blood up to $100 a barrel now, too? Instead of, say, a little ketchup after the cast members are symbolically dispatched by the Barber of Fleet Street, they stand up and struggle to put on red-stained lab coats. That’s just a bit distracting when there’s new action taking place onstage. 
There is nothing that says Christmas like A Christmas Carol, as written in the 1800s by Charles Dickens. This classic and timeless story of Ebenezer Scrooge is certainly a beloved holiday favorite. In the beginning, he is visited by the ghost of his dead friend, who tells him he is going to be visited by three more ghosts on Christmas Eve: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Now, and the Ghost of Christmas Future. In the end, Scrooge realizes that it is very important to celebrate Christmas, as shown by his throwing money to a lad in the street for a goose.
I told my mom I am going to see the Christmas Carol play with my friend Heather, but I am really going on a date with my boyfriend, Rick. I met Rick on MySpace. We have been dating for two weeks. He is 29 years old! This is his picture off MySpace. Dating an older man means I can get into bars and concerts, and Rick buys me alcohol! I like to drink Zima and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Tonight, he is parking three blocks from my house so my parents won’t see him pick me up. They totally would not understand. Then I’m making him take me to see Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God, DevilDriver, and Soilwork at Memorial Hall (600 North Seventh Street, Kansas City, Kansas, 913-371-7555). Tonight I think I might kiss Rick for the first time! But he has to buy me Zima.

Look: We admit it. We were scooped by The Kansas City Star Thursday so forcefully that a tiny, vital part inside of us broke. Now we can feel it rattling around inside, like a cigarette butt in a beer can. I’ve personally apologized to our entire editorial staff for the complete failure of The Pitch's Night & Day section to highlight what is obviously the biggest entertainment story to hit Kansas City since marshmallowy singer Garth Brooks occupied the Sprint Center for a record-setting nine nights. Note that I’m using the word occupy the same way that hippies were described as “occupying” university administration buildings, often while wearing nothing but hemp sandals. Like the hippies, Brooks had to be forcibly dislodged by a hail of obsessive Timothy Finn blog reviews. And come to think of it, we totally missed the Garth Brooks story, too. So we’re 0-2 on this whole thing.
Adapting classic works for ice makes them that much better, the same way that reinterpreting Star Trek in the idiom of teddy bears adds layers of semiotic complexity to the glass case where your grandma keeps her Hummel figurine collection. Though I am forced to follow the example of the Kansas City Star Preview section in explicitly recommending High School Musical: The Ice Tour to readers of The Pitch, I would also like to point out that the excellent pun in the Preview headline, “High School Musical: The Ice Tour Is on the Rink of Success,” is followed up by this amazing play on words in the subhead: “Disney’s super franchise shows no signs of melting down anytime soon.” Then, inside, I found the headline “Ice Cool Musical.” While we’re doing our Daniel-san wax-on, wax-off in Preview’s backyard, hopefully Preview will also teach us which odd jobs will give us the muscle memory for crafting puns.
As a final act of contrition and an apes-in-the-wild display of submission to The Kansas City Star, I have crafted the image at right. Like a disgraced Japanese business executive in a movie caricaturing Japanese business culture, I now end my period of public self-flagellation.

Tomorrow night's ninth episode of the Garth Brooks Down Home Country Jamboree will be broadcast live from the Sprint Center to 300 movie theaters around the country for the benefit of people who are into watching concerts by proxy in movie theaters. Ordinarily, we’d make fun of this kind of person by resorting to a crude stereotype, but literally nobody we’ve ever met or heard about would ever pay money to watch a projected concert on a movie screen. It’s something that lies at the edge of imagination, like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft Color Out of Space deal.
