On Friday, we headed up to Cleveland for the second time in four days. For Christmas, Mer had gotten me tickets to a couple of shows at Playhouse Square’s 14th Street Theater, which is a small cabaret-style theater. This evening, we were there to see Last Call Cleveland, a sketch comedy group.
As some readers of ye olde blog know, I coach an improv comedy group. Improv comedy is where everything on stage is made up off the cuff. Sketch comedy, on the other hand (or the other stage), is where the group does short skits that were written and practiced before the show (think Saturday Night Live). I haven’t had much experience with sketch comedy, so I was looking forward to the evening.
Before the show, we had supper at Otto Moser’s near the theater. Otto Moser’s claims to be the oldest restaurant in Cleveland. Neither of us had ever been before, and we liked it very much. It was mostly pub-grub (burgers and such), but they did it well.
Last Call Cleveland had an opening act of a stand-up comic. I was delighted – I had never seen a stand-up comic before, and was excited to see one live. The man was very good. His parents were Puerto Rican and Mexican, so some of his humor was ethnically based. He did have some swearing and some off-color humor, but much of his humor was pretty clean and very funny. Our favorite skit was where he was coming up for slogans for JoAnn Fabrics; we especially loved “For homeschool kids, it’s called a field trip!”
The stand-up comedian’s act was about fifteen minutes, and then Last Call Cleveland took the stage. They were very energetic; the group was made up of four guys in their early thirties. They set up a recurring skit for the evening in that they were given the task of going back in time to save Cleveland from itself by stopping the river fire, the Municipal Stadium beer riot, and the last-second Michael Jordan shot that beat the Cavaliers when it looked as if they would go to the NBA Finals. That set the tone for the evening – lots of good-natured ribbing of Cleveland, which I loved.
They had a lot of funny skits, but I really loved one near the end where two of the guys sang a song based on a true story of an encounter with a five-year-old at Walmart. It did not turn out well for the adult guy who wrote the song. It was also amusing to watch the audience. There was a bar, so the audience mostly got feeling better and better as the show went on, and we even heard one woman say how much better the second half of the show was compared to the first half. She was raising her third sheet at that time.
It was a funny evening, and I laughed a lot. We did have yet another long ride home as another storm had moved in while the show was in progress. On the whole, it was not too bad, but there were a few tense moments on Route 80, which was oddly crowded for 11:00 pm on a snowy Friday night. We made it home just fine. The evening was a great Christmas present from Mer.