When CRUMBS was in Mannheim and Cologne.

The tour continues...

Mannheim

Mannheim is a town where there is a theatre called the TiG7. This is a theatre that has never steered us wrong. The audience and the energy on that stage has made it so we've never done a bad show there (… well, we don't do bad shows anywhere right?). Anyways, this time in Mannheim is no different.

The show:

Inspirations: "The Deathstar" and "Football (soccer)"

The show followed the story of a young boy who was terrible at football, much to the disappointment of his father. Now it turned out that when the father was young, he almost became a professional footballer. When he had his son, he had to give up his career and get a job to support the family. Well, it also turned out that the boy's coach was the father's best friend when they were young… wait, the coincidences don't stop there. It also turns out that the coach is the boy's father (imagine the scene where the coach tells the boy that he's his father…). In one moment of infidelity, the mother had slept with the best friend coach, so obviously there's been tension in the family ever since. Whoa.

We also got to see the inner troubles of the designer of the Deathstar, torn between doing a good job for the empire and feeling like maybe the rebels were the good guys. We even get the see how the Deathstar plans got into the hands of the rebels. We also meet a couple of collectors of Star Wars memorabilia. One seems to be more sinister and evil. One of them is simply looking for the final piece to his collection, a Deathstar prototype. Well, after trading an audience member's shirt for the final piece, we learn that the shirt used to belong to George Lucas himself. It turns out that he threw it away after banking Return of the Jedi, and that was the reason the "new" three movies sucked so hard. They both realize that the shirt must be brought to Disney so when they make episode VII it doesn't suck. Let's hope that happens.

P.S. The Deathstar is in reference to Star Wars and therefore inspired all the Star Wars references. I hope the German audiences were able to follow along without knowing Star Wars as intimately as a North American audience.

Cologne

We arrived in Cologne to do some workshops, no show. Cologne, it turns out, is not where cologne comes from. We taught workshops and had a relaxing time. We were able to relax thanks to Clamotta (our hosts) who helped us deal with the problems at our hotel. Sometimes people work in the service industry and are not "service" people. I don't know what happened to the guy at the front desk, perhaps he was forced at gun point to work in a hotel, but he should rethink his job and do everyone a favour and find new work, new work that doesn't involve any interaction with humans whatsoever. Do what you love and love what you do. I suppose that's easy for us to say, we have the best job in the world.

P.S. Cologne may not be where the musky male perfume originated, but they do have the SMALLEST BEERS IN THE WORLD!

Oh, I've been taking pictures out the window of the train using the panorama feature on my camera. I get some pretty interesting results. I will keep you posted with my panorama experiments. I hope you like them.

Thanks for reading the words. Thanks for looking at the pictures. Thanks for coming to the shows. Thanks for taking the workshops.

The CRUMBS tour continues...

When CRUMBS were in Bremen and Munich

We then made some stops on our tour. Our CRUMBs tour is sometimes a whirlwind, sometimes even a worldwind.

Bremen

Bremen is a nice town. Known most being the home of Beck's beer. Most German's consider it to be like the McDonald's of beer...

This time in Bremen was one of those times where CRUMBS splits in two and "double teams" Europe. Stephen teaches in one town and Lee teaches in another. In this case it was Stephen in Bremen and Lee in Karlsruhe. All I can say is that the workshops and the good times in Bremen were had (and from what we know, the good times were had in Karlsruhe too). 

P.S. I had the most wonderful Schnapps in Bremen. Lee had some horrible Schnapps in Karlsruhe.

Munich

Now Munich is always nice. It's always nice to us because we have the lovely folks at Isar 148 to take care of us. We ended up doing a show in a big tent (not our first tent mind you). The show was wonderful, as the crowds in Munich are always so pumped to have us in their town.

The show: Inspirations: "tweezers" and "love (butterflies in the stomach)"

The story followed two medical students at "The Best God Damn" Medical School. One of the students would faint at the sight of blood, so the other decided to help cure him of this most unfortunate affliction. The best idea he had for this was of course, forcing him to stab him in the eye. Bad idea, his eye goo all oozed out and he was blinded. As a result, they were kicked out of the school. The get reinstated they realized their best chance was to find a cure for an eye being stabbed. Let's just say that after stabbing the other eye, eventually both eyes were cured. Happy ending right?

The other story followed two roommates. One having the best day, the other having the worst day. The best day guy, let's call him Josh, had just met a girl and it was love at first sight. The worst day guy, let's call him Dave, had just realized his life was shit, his job was shit and he had nothing to live for. It gets kind of complicated, but, Josh almost loses his girl, she was choosing her career over love. She eventually gets to climb the corporate ladder in the calculator redistributing business and have love too. In fact, it was love that melted the heart of the "asshole" client who won her the promotion. Dave finds music and realizes that maybe life is worth living. More happy endings.

P.S. "tweezers" while not directly mentioned in the show, inspired the medical school story thread… really… it did.

When CRUMBS was in Graz.

Above is a group of us walking in the snowy Graz street. Below is Lee distorted in a picture.

Graz. Graz is the coolest little city you've never heard of. Unless of course you've ever read my blog or know a thing or two about Europe or Austria. I guess I shouldn't assume that you don't know, you're probably a very smart and well informed person, after all, you are reading this blog (*not sarcasm).

Graz is the home of a wonderful theatre company known as Theater Im Bahnhof (TiB) and they do improv as well as "actual", "real" and "legitimate" theatre. In fact, it goes beyond that, they do challenging and avant guard work.

Now CRUMBS tours around a lot, you know that, you read this blog. We've been to Graz a number of times. We usually show up, do a show and then leave, and it all happens too fast. So we decided to start initiating projects along our tour, so that we could stay in a city for a little longer and actually develop something. So this time in Graz, we were actually working together for a week brainstorming on a co-production between CRUMBS and TiB. The plan is to continue creating this new show and eventually (fingers crossed) present the show next year. Exciting right? (yes it is exciting)

-A picture of Lee and I when there used to be a Chi-Chi's in Graz

-A picture of the artificial island in Graz

-A picture of the stairs leading to the castle on the mountain

-A picture inside the cafe inside the island (illegal picture)

Thanks for reading the internet words posted here. More to come.