My review of 'An Evening with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood', at the Lied Center of Lawrence, KS, on November 28th, 2004.
I went to the show with my mom and my best friend, who also happens to be a Whoser. We got there at six, and the doors opened at six-thirty. Our seats were very good ones: about two rows back, orchestra right. The fact that they were aisle seats became very very handy later on in the evening.
However before we sat down we were talking to one of the ushers to be sure these were our seats and at first she was confused and thought our seats were up in one of the wall-boxes, which really worried us since this was the first show any of us had seen and we wanted to have our suggestions heard and/or get pulled up on stage. But we pointed out it said ORCHESTRA (since when does the orchestra play in the boxes?) and sat down.
We waited for about forty minutes or so. Whoever was in charge of sound had chosen to play some very old, crappy, "classic" rock that I had never even heard. For the entire forty minutes. We were really ready for them to shut it off and start the show.
So finally Colin and Brad came out to thunderous applause. We positively flipped out, words cannot even BEGIN to describe how excited I was. These men are our idols and this was the very first time we had seen them in person!! I was tingling.
Colin was going for basic black with a long-sleeved black button-up shirt, black slacks, and black high-top Chucks that really seemed to pull it all together. Brad was wearing jeans and a brown shirt checkered with blue and regular shoes.
Right after introducing themselves and explaining how most of the show would be fueled by audience suggestions, etc, Colin went down the aisle on the other side of the theatre from us and handed out the things for Sentences.
The first game of the evening was Moving Bodies. After getting "volunteers" they asked for a European country and a place they would go to see there and settled on Belgium to see a brewery. As you know, Colin and Brad are masters of accents and dialects, which they demonstrated with their lovely Belgian accents. And as you also know, the movers are always excellent at making Whosers walk and responding to cues. And as you ALSO know, I am being very sarcastic.
Colin and Brad began talking about going to the brewery together. They decided to get to the brewery by means of a moped, the moped was "over there....and when I say over there I mean a direction....I'm not pointing so I mean the direction that I am thinking of in my mind" - Colin - and began walking towards the opposite side of the stage to get on. Colin was in front and Brad grabbed onto his chest from behind. Colin advised Brad to "watch out for the curve" but apparently they just went over it because the movers did nothing.
After reaching the brewery, they got off of their moped. Brad stopped grabbing onto Colin, turned his torso, and walked off. Colin did the same after having his torso turned while his hands were still in steering position he decided "I'll just take my handlebars with me into the brewery". The brewery was on the side of the stage that they had started out on. Colin and Brad decided to have a race to get into the brewery, which was very funny. By now the movers had sharpened up a bit but seeing them try to get Colin and Brad to walk was, well, interesting, their steps were either three inches or three feet. Colin won the race by a hair and he and Brad enjoyed a mug of Belgian beer together.
The next game played was Double Dub. Colin explained this one, and it seemed pretty confusing, but once it began it was understandable. It was like the WL game Dubbing except Brad did the voices for Colin and one "volunteer", Diane; Colin did the voices for Brad and the other "volunteer", Alan. The scene was that the four of them worked in a plastic bag factory. Alan didn't really understand when he was supposed to be moving his lips, which got a couple of quips from Colin about ventriloquism and being able to talk without lip movement.
Colin made Alan's voice deep and Brad's voice very funny. Brad made Diane's voice very high and girlish, Colin's voice was deep. At one point there was a love triangle (well, rectangle) between Diane and everyone else. Diane eventually chose Brad because she wanted "a piece of lovin' from that big sexy hunk of manliness over there".
Rhyming Verse or "Dr. Seuss Game" was played next. This game was played by speaking in rhymes: Person 1 would say something, Person 2 would say something that rhymed with it, and something else, Person 1 would rhyme with the something else, etc. They asked for something weird two people would fight over other than money or women and chose the suggestion "chili peppers". Brad explained that at some point in the game the chili pepper argument would become so frenzied that he and Colin would begin to duel with a strange object (the object chosen was fish sticks).
The basic plot of the scene was that Colin had stolen Brad's chili peppers and eaten them all, and now Brad's food was bland and chili pepper-less. Both of them kept trying to screw the other up - "I will cut out your esophagus!" "There are more chili peppers in the sarcophagus, but meanwhile I will remove your paragecium!" - but the line that began the funniest part of the game, if not the show so far, was when Brad said "You will be dead, on the ground, in the muck!" and grinned. Hmm, wonder what rhymes with muck??
Both of them kept trying to avoid the obvious answer - "I play hockey, I will kill you with my puck", "Oh, here is some corn that I must now shuck" "Just like a chicken you will no longer cluck" "It seems we have run out of luck", - it was now back to Colin and you could see him trying desperately to think of something to say but finally he just said "Oh, f---". My sides were literally aching after that and I was not alone.
After that they played New Choice. Colin pulled up two young guys, early teens maybe, from the left side of the theatre and Brad looked around my area for someone to come up. I was raising my hand WILDLY and bouncing out of my seat, and Brad pointed down and said "How about that young lady down here raising her hand -" and at first I was ECSTATIC " -in the headband" but realized he was pointing to a girl diagonally in front of me. Nuts. Interestingly enough her name was Claire, too.
Their project was that they were building a space shuttle. I felt so sorry for Colin and Brad because those kids were honking their horns every other second. At first they named their space shuttle Explorer. Then they changed it to Tim to Flying Thing before settling on MoFo. Then they climbed inside and Brad explained what the buttons and levers inside did. They: turned it on, did the blender, did the Tang, flushed the space toilet, operated the microwave open, and a whole bunch of other things I can't remember until finally Brad announced that "this button does everything all the others before it did."
The buttons in question went from being tin cans on string to painted cans to unpainted cans, as explained by Colin who went from working as a scientist to being the guy in the Pooh suit. They also named the space monkey and suggested doing different things like cleaning the windows and sleeping and observing planets in the shuttle.
The last game played before intermission was Interrogation. They flipped a coin and Brad was going to be the guilty one. This is where the aisle seat became handy: he took our aisle out of the theatre and walked right next to me. Maybe six inches or so. I. was. elated.
Colin asked everyone for some items of clothing, odd crimes, places, and evidence until it was decided that the crime Brad committed was:
While wearing a muumuu, striped toe socks, and a witch's hat that made him invisible, Brad goosed the president, deflated the Pillsbury Doughboy, and exposed himself to a blind person. He did this in Tanatuba at Albino's Tanning Salon (somebody after this yelled out "Albino BALD GUY'S Tanning Salon!" which earned him a finger from Colin) and left behind a bar of soap as evidence.
So then Brad was brought back in and had to guess his crime. Colin did a pretty good job of getting him to guess. For the witch's hat he did stuff like "Let's start off with what you were wearing *witch cackle*" and "I'll get your confession - and your little dog too!" For the doughboy bit things like "Maybe if i bake some crescent rolls you'll confess" and "confess! *pokes him in the tum like the doughboy*" but the only thing that tripped Brad up was Albino's Tanning Salon. Colin mentioned something about accomplices and not doing something until he saw the whites of their eyes, but that just got Brad to guess that the tanning salon belonged to Paul Revere, the founding fathers, or the Revolutionary War. For the bar of soap bit Colin went on about Brad needing to wash away his sins and cleanse himself of his wrongdoing. Eventually he got all of it, but if he tripped up Colin made him start his confession over again, which took a couple of times.
The intermission was about fifteen minutes long, again they played the same bad music. The first game back was Rap. I thought it was Sound FX because they brought out two mikes and my friend and I were raising our hands like crazy. Brad, though, brought up a guy from the other side of the audience.
The guy looked like Santa Claus to Brad (and everyone else) and Colin and Brad asked him a few questions about himself. Santa lived in Topeka and was the head of a Bakers, Confectionaries, Tobacco, and Grain Millers company. Brad thought this was very funny that it was all four jobs combined. But then Santa told us that he could benchpress 475 lbs, drove a Harley, collected beer steins, and was nicknamed Bear. That got Brad worried: "I was going to make fun of you for looking like Santa and making cupcakes but with one arm you could lift me up and kick my ass..."
So they started making up a rap song about him and Brad would do the rap and then he'd go "What is yo name?" and Santa was supposed to reply "I'm M.C. Bear." Colin did this really funny gangsta thing and also pretended to be a DJ with the stool. That cracked me up since nothing's better than a 47-year-old, bald, white, Canadian gangsta.
Sentences was the next game. Colin and Brad asked for something two people would fight over and I shouted out "Ryan's shoes!" I don't know if they only heard the last bit or what, but Colin used 'shoes'. He was King Asparagus and Brad was Portfolio. Some of the scenes actually added to the story, which was that the neighboring country had been stealing all their country's shoes, resulting in war. The troops had only petunias to fight with but kept morale high with their motto "I'd like a breast!". In addition to stealing shoes, the king of the other country had been playing Bunko with King Asparagus's wife, and there was a ring around the bathtub, but that was alright since Colin was, as Brad called him, Lord of the Rings.
Then they played Marriage and a married couple was brought up (this one was celebrating their anniversary). They were told that Colin would play the wife and Brad would play the husband and they would go about a day in the life of the couple. Both of them (the couple) had a bell and a duck call, they rang the bell if something was right and quacked the duck call if it was way off. it was my least favorite game cuz mostly it was just getting way, way, way too much information about the couple.
After that, they played Sound FX and they were asked for a dangerous job. There were several suggestions of non-dangerous jobs; one man shouted out "Puppeteer!" which made Colin say "Ooh, I've got a hand up my ass, scary!" Eventually they used the job of a S.W.A.T. team member and brought up a man and a woman from the audience to make the sounds.
They started off making cappucino (Colin claimed that the machine wasn't good at making foam) and then talked into a dead radio (Brad thought it must be a slow night) and then drove around in their S.W.A.T. car and honked the horn. At that point the guy did a honk that sounded like an ice cream truck so Brad said "S.W.A.T. team!" like 'Ice cream!' and from then on did that at any slow point of the night. They finally stopped the car and fired weak guns and grenades that didn't explode at some terrorists.
The last game of the night was Mousetrap. Some stagehands brought out a table filled with one hundred mousetraps which Colin helped put all over the stage as Brad began explaining. He joked that they were going to release a mouse and the trap that got it had a number under it that would match the number of one of our seats and that person would get a prize. Half of the audience looked down to see their number and the other half acted disgusted. Brad said he was kidding and did his usual bit about how the traps were "gerbil guillotines, hamster hell, weapons of mouse destruction". Colin and Brad were going to take off their shoes and socks and do a scene over the mousetraps. Colin looked up from setting the traps and asked in a very sincere voice, "Hey Brad, is there anything we could do to make this game even more stupid?" Brad replied "Why, yes, there is, Colin, we're both going to be blindfolded as we play Alphabet." One of the stagehands ducked backstage and brought out two pairs of goggles that were completely duck-taped on the inside.
They asked for an activity around the house and got spring cleaning (Brad interjected "Spring cleaning, as winter comes upon us...") Mostly they just walked around trying to avoid the mousetraps and do the scene, but as the game went on they forgot about playing Alphabet and just concentrated on trying to throw mousetraps on each other. It was both hilarious and emotionally painful to watch Brad and Colin innocently trying to do a scene and get trap-snapped and go 'eee!' or 'ooh!' or 'f----!'. Colin was good at avoiding Brad, but he threw one once and got Colin, who acted like it had really hurt. Another time Colin threw one that landed about an inch or two away from Brad's crotch. Finally Brad lifted up his goggles and motioned for us to 'shh' and nabbed Colin with a lot of mousetraps. Colin said "He hasn't got his goggles on, has he?" and took his off. They gestured to the other while everyone applauded and got a standing ovation.
Quickly we went outside and asked someone working there if they were giving autographs. (Advice: If you go to a show and want the best chance of meeting the guys, find out BEFORE the show where the stage door is) The man talked on his radio and told us that they weren't, but there was a small crowd of people listening. We waited in the car for a bit and came back in when no one was there, but none of the ushers knew where Colin or Brad would be, so back outside again.
We circled the building and saw a door marked 'Stage Entrance' so we grabbed our things and went up. It was locked, and we knocked a lot and waited. This was late November at about ten, just days after snow, so we went back and waited in the car. Eventually the door opened (!!) - but it was just a stagehand who swore that Colin and Brad had left already.
