CRUMBS

CRUMBS first show in France! It is the French world premiere! We are in Lyon, France and we are trying to channel the energy of Jerry Lewis to make sure they like us.

And even though we channeled the energy of Jerry Lewis there was still only 11 people in the audience, this is a new record for a CRUMBS show on our Euro Touro! We haven't had an audience that small since our “just starting out” days, when we were “paying our dues”. I guess we still have some left over dues to pay in France.

4 stories

-A man and a woman meet on beach with their dogs. He is recently widowed and she has recently been surgically separated from her siamese twin... a classic love story no?


-World War 2, France, invading Germans, two French soldiers trick a German soldier into deserting.


-A princess, a warrior and an evil king. A fairy tale


-I cannot for the life of me remember the last story... I bet you it was the best one.


While there were not a lot of people at our mixed show with En Compagnie we did go to their show the night before and it was packed. And we did hang out with them and jam a bit before the show. They were really fun and really funny people. It was really like we traveled to Lyon to hang out with them and not really to do a show. It was also really nice to be somewhere that I actually understood most of what was being said around me (Thank you Mom & Dad for forcing me to learn French when I was in school). I felt like it wouldn't take me long to scrub all the rust off the french I do have.

CRUMBS in Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe... direct translation? Karl's quiet, or Karl's relaxing place... or something like that. It turns out that Karl (some super cool ruler of some sort) had his relaxing castle here and this is where his wife stayed. I suppose he had other places where there were loud party mistresses.

The show was at a place called Z10, it is where the show was and also where we ate and where we slept too. It was like a 3 in 1 all purpose place, we could have done anything there and not have needed to step outside once.

Our musician for the show was a dude who was also studying to be a meteorologist... so at first we thought the group had misunderstood us and thought that we needed a weatherman instead of a musician for the show. Next we thought he was an expert on meteors. Then we just asked him all the questions that we could think of about weather before we had the show... you know, just to make him feel comfortable.

Here is how it went:

CRUMBS – So is global warming real?

Meteorologist/Musician - Yes, it is measurably.

C – Do you think it is caused by humans?

M – Most definitely.

C – Is weather always happening?

M – Yes.

C – So, if it isn't raining or anything and it is just sunny, it is still weather?

M – Yeah, weather is always happening.

C – Is there weather on the moon?

M – Umm, no.

C – Why not? What about when it is sunny there?

M – Um, well, because weather is the effect on atmosphere.

C – And the moon doesn't have an atmosphere?

M – No.

C – Are you sure?

M – I am almost completely sure.

C – Is there weather on the sun?

M – No.

C – Do meteors affect the weather?

M – Uh...

C – I mean, they would affect the atmosphere wouldn't they?

M – I guess...

C – Could you tell me what the weather will be like on my birthday?

M – You can only maybe predict a couple of days ahead.

C – They can only "maybe" predict?

M – Yeah.

C – They should call them Maybeologists.

M – Yeah, I guess so.



The show suggestions were = lego, sports car, refrigerator?

It starts with an old married couple in the kitchen. The husband is upset because their fridge is broken and they will have to get a new one. He was very attached to it, he had it in college and it was the first appliance he had ever bought.


We then jump to a garage that fixes cars, but hey, they are really bad at fixing cars. They are called “Speedy” (no relation to the actual “Speedy” muffler). We see a guy bringing his car in to be fixed, and fixed quick as he needs to pick his wife up at the Hospital (why he decides to bring his car in to the shop at that moment I don't know?).


We see the wife talking to her Doctor. There is something wrong with the wife, but none of the tests are showing anything... medical mystery.


The old couple finally adopt a little beat up fridge named josh, and it seems to fill the emptiness of them not being able to have kids of their own. They have a nice funeral for their old one.

The doctor realizes that on the X-ray there are a number of sad faces inside his patient. He calls in an expert and they remove them, it cures of depression. This instantly fixes the problems in the marriage. They get a car in the shape of a whale... it made sense, trust us.

CRUMBS in Wuerzburg

Wuerzburg is a pretty little town. It translates directly into spice town, but jeez, it isn't really that spicy.

This is our second stop on this tour in this nice little town. It has a strong art scene, music scene improv scene. Mostly because of the Cairo, which is a cultural organization run by some pretty awesome folks. This makes for a strong community of artists that help each other out and support each others events and each others work (from what i can see anyways). This is inspiring.

Our show was supposed to be an open air show in the courtyard (like we have done the past few years to a crowd of 300) but it was rained out, so we packed half that number into the theatre that really comfortably seats 100... it was pretty cool. (i have used the word pretty some many times in this post already, you must be pretty sick of that already, that and all the use of brackets).

The CRUMBS mixed show with Die Kaktussen:

Driving Miss Daisy remounted


A mother who has to give up her first born to her evil boss Mr Frankentsein


A pretty girl who pits two best friends against each other... they chose each other in the end.


A thai women learns to start her own business rather than be controlled by her rice inspector husband (based on a true story)


The 2nd half centred around one story. A story about a Queendom threatened by a dragon. The greatest warrior was defeated and the only hope was, according to the prophecy, a small boy. The small boy left his family farm to follow his heart. He eventually used the power of language to convince the dragon to follow his own heart. Th dragon then transformed back into the lost king and all was good.



Awe, fairy tales huh?

CRUMBS in Graz

CRUMBS in Graz, Austria. We get to visit Jacob and Lili but no Trixi... So Hooray! Hooray! and Boo!

It is inspiring to be in Graz too. TiB are an inspiring bunch of people. Their current project is of course Top Secret but I can say this, it involves the audience wearing headphones and walking around a mall... doesn't it just get your imagination running wild?

The first half of the show was a CRUMBS show, it consisted of:

-Two drug store workers who hate everything.


-Two museum guards who are bored with everything. they are guarding Children's Museum of kids throughout the ages.


-One drug store guy meets a woman and falls in love (of course right?) She teaches him to eat ice cream.


-There might have been mention of the dangers of tampons.

-The guards catch a thief but then let him go. He was trying to steal a painting of his father, when his father was a child obviously. One of the guards paints a forgery and they open their own museum together.

The second half of the show was a mixed show with TiB. It was a film noir style destruction of the main character. The show also had really nice use of lights. We had some lamps onstage that we could manipulate to create some of the shadow and dark look that the films of the era had. It was very fun to play. Here is the second half in a nutshell.

-Engineering professor working on a way to make quiet scooters
-Professor gets wrapped up in some seedy dirty deals
-He then kills some people, all for a lady (the femme fatale)


Some of the lines uttered in the show could potentially be made into songs by a band named The Base.
Join their Facebook page here.
Check out their Myspace page (their cover of "Eye of the Tiger" will make you melt)

Here are the lines that might become songs:
“say goodbye to scooterboy”
“it smells like there was a party here last night and it lasted forever”


next stop: Wuerzburg (the sequel)

CRUMBS Euro Touro 2010 in a Minute

CRUMBS in The Lube

The Lube...

Not that Ljubljana needs to have a nickname, it already has a gorgeous name, but “The Lube” just nicknames itself really. I guess I also have to mention here that I learned how to really remember how to spell Slovenia... it is the country with “Love” in it. So now I won't forget.

First item of business, Gregore bought a new car. Very nice but I do have to say that I don't know why he didn't just buy a Kangoo (because Alanka and Maja both have one and they are even the same colour). Narobov could have been the theatre company with only one type of vehicle. Gregore also earned his Phd in Philosophy and can now practice his doctoring on life. He wrote and published his book on NOTHING! What do I mean? His whole philosophy was focused on nothing, how some nothings are really something and have an output or an effect. I no longer look at nothing the same way. Thanks philosophers.



Second order of business, Tomash (not how he spells it, but how it is pronounced) has published three books! They are children's books, but, THREE BOOKS!

Third order of business, Maja and Tomash (I know, spelling) have a baby girl who is among the cutest of all babies (your baby is cute too, worry not).

Fourth order of business, Ligretto. Ligretto is a card game that has the power to make best friends enemies, the power to make nuns swear like sailors and sailors weep like willows. The beauty of the game is the speed, you really don't have to wait for the other slow-poke players to get their act together, you just play. (But what is a Ligretto Speed Machine?)



Fifth order of business, the Canadian game show “Talk About”. We have now successfully integrated this game into the Slovenian scene. We have adapted it into a party game that you can play while sitting around with friends. We also played “names of paper” and “who is most likely” (those are not the real names of the games, but as of yet I don't know them).



The show in Kamnick


The show started with a lazy, still at home son who spends (read as wastes) his life away on WoW (read as World of Warcraft). His older brother has a a business and his parents are both fed up (Dad is to hard on him, Mom is to soft).


We then go to the forest to see the adventures of a nervous little rabbit and his crush on a sexy rabbit and their journey to where the good flowers grow (and the ever present danger of the wolf lies, just a regular wolf though, not a werewolf).


We also see a couple of bungling cops who just hate their uncomfortable uniforms, we see the old chief of police who doesn't care about the uniforms and the popular mayor who care about results to the crime wave that has been plaguing the city.


Side note: The mayor of The Lube is currently enjoying something like 80% of the vote and insists that he only get paid the same percentage of his approval rating of what he normally would get... brilliant and popular. Sam Katz would get starved out of office.

The rabbit eventually out smarts the wolf (after some potentially confusing plots twists). The ruse is witnessed by a couple of wise old birds... the ruse also involves some dumb old chickens and a chicken farmers shotgun. The rabbits then do it like... well, rabbits.


The dumb cops (why are cops so fun to play dumb?) stumble in on a bank robbery in progress and have no idea what to do... and cause a big fat mess. The chief lies to the mayor and the cops become heroes (and get their new pink uniforms).


The lazy son convinces his parents to start playing WoW and they finally get to share something as a family... awe.

Soooo,
Not even the asshole train dude who didn't fully explain why he was charging us extra on the tickets we had already bought can tarnish this place. He even insisted that I take my bag off the seat and put it up in the baggage compartment... on the near empty train... where all the other people had their bags on their seats!!! Nope, not even that guy can tarnish this place. The Slovenians are inspiring.

Next stop: Graz

CRUMBS in Munich

CRUMBS in Munich


Oh Munich... or Ming-Ah if you happen to have a dialect so thick that words completely change in your mouth somehow (the earlier post with Roland demonstrating proper pronunciation of Munich).

It had been awhile since Isar 148 had brought us in to town, and we finally broke them down and they let us come and play. We love to play with Roland and Birgit of Isar 148, they are professionals and so playful onstage. We always have a great time being silly onstage and talking serious offstage (we are also talking silly with them offstage too).

The CRUMBS show at “Theatre... Und so Fort” was so fun to do. The venue is now one of my new favourites to play (right up there with the Ratibor, the TiG7 and the theatre that you play at...).

The story started with a babysitter to a little girl who pretends to be a princess and of course loves horses (she wants a purple horse).



The married couple who hired the babysitter are going to the theatre, but of course the husband doesn't want that kind of boring “faggy” culture.



We see two guys who work in a flea market selling their mountains of crap.
Examples include:
-a hairdryer
-cords to mystery items
-old records
-mix tapes
-batteries

The babysitter invites over her teen-aged boyfriend so that they can make out, but he brings his older brothers condom and they are determined to become adults and “do it”, if only they knew how.

The Husband and Wife end up fighting because he won't keep his mouth shut at the play, but then he gets sucked in and at the end of the play can't believe the outcome and forces the actors to fall in love (embarrassing yet beautiful).

The boyfriend and girlfriend end up “sort of” doing it. The little girl asks what “popping a cherry” means, chokes on a toy, boyfriend gives her the Heimlich maneuver while naked just as the husband and wife return from their date... and we didn't even mention the cup at the flea market from the seven hundredth century!

Note: We had several people after the show ask us what "popping your cherry" was... oops.



I should mention and apologize for how behind this blog is... and always is. Just so people can be confused, CRUMBS is currently in Italy, we were just France, before that we were in Wuerzbuerg, Karlsruhe and Ljubljana, Slovenia... The next post will probably be about Ljubljana.

Thank you for reading this (and I know that you have, because you just read this)

Life in the 1890's

So this is Matt from Atlanta's Dad'a Garage. He just happened to be in Berlin when we did the Berlin International Impro Festival, and we just happened to be doing a little out doors improv concept show, and he just happens to be really cool so I just happened to film him doing this.