Euro Touro 2016 Part 1

CRUMBS are back on tour in Europe. It hasn't been since 2014 that CRUMBS have been together on European soil. Pretty exciting stuff right? And to think that it was way back in the spring of 2001 that CRUMBS first hopped over the pond from Canada to Europe so if I do the math correctly and crunch the numbers... it is the 15 year anniversary of CRUMBS on a Euro Touro. Wow, time does fly by. 

Here's what the little Euro Touro looks like:

Sat, May 7th - Hamburg

Thu, May 12th - Berlin 

Sat, May 14th - The Hague

Thu, May 19-May 21 - Leipzig

Sun, May 22nd - Baden (CH)

Sun, May 29th - Berlin

CRUMBS says it's almost Summer

Summer is finally rearing it's gorgeous head here in Winnipeg and CRUMBS is busy doing all the CRUMBS things. That includes, but is not limited to:

1.

Lee White putting the finishing touches on the Euro Touro. With stops to be made in London for a festival and some shows with Rene Dellefont with a CRUMBS and Dad's Garage co-production.

2.

Stephen Sim gearing up for the Fringe Festival with CRUMBS again back at the King's Head and with the Big Stupid Improv Show at MTYP. But Stephen has been busy with other things too, there are more shows in the near future to get all excited by. Here are some of them...

Comedy Knights is still happening every Tuesday for FREE at the King's Head and this Tuesday, June 3rd is the Recital Show for the Stand-ups who have been taking improv workshops with Stephen. They've been doing such a swell job, you should come to the show and see just how hilarious funny people can be when they are free to make it up.

A collaboration with the Spoken Word Festival at the Gas Station Arts Centre. The Thursday, June 5th show will feature spoken works artists (which is a fancy way of saying poets) performing their "thing" with improvisers (which is a fancy way of saying "lazy actor/comedians") performing their thing. The poems will inspire the improvs, the improvs will inspire the poets and everything will be so inspiring that the whole audience will probably just laugh, cry and melt into beauty.

Of course keep tuning in to the CRUMBS radio show on 101.5 UMFM every Monday at 5pm CST for amazing guests saying amazing things. We've been having some pretty good guests on the show lately (With Lee being on tour). Here are some of the past guests in picture form.

Thin Lizzy

Ryan "internet famous" McMahon

Paul "Purple Room" Little

WINNIPEG FRINGE FESTIVAL 2014!!!

CRUMBS will be back at the King's Head for the Fringe. The Big Stupid Improv Show will be at the wonderful MTYP. Those shows are shows you want to see. But there are sooooo many shows to see at the Fringe. FRAZ will be premiering his new show (produced, dramaturged and directed by Stephen Sim), as well as Outside Joke doing their show, DnD Improv, Rumble Pak doing their show, Parking Lots doing their show, Bill Pats doing a new show, JD Renaud doing a new show… there are just so many shows.

Fringe is a wonderful time.

Enjoy your summer and we will see you soon.

Here are some back alley dumpster graffiti in Winnipeg just for the heck of it.

Thanks for reading this

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 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.

CRUMBS Euro Touro Spring 2013

 Hello internet,

CRUMBS is just about to depart on their 15th tour of Europe. Perhaps by the time you read this they are already knee deep into the tour. Perhaps you are really slow getting to these words and the tour is already over. Maybe you are really really slow reading this and all the members of CRUMBS and anyone who ever saw them live are long long dead. Who knows. How am I supposed to know when you read this. I can't even be sure you're reading this AT ALL.

But for those of you that are actually reading this, and honestly, that is who I should be writing this for anyway, here is some useful information about the CRUMBS tour in the Spring of 2013.

First of all, we at CRUMBS would love to have you come to every single show. Secondly, we'd love you to share the show with every single person you know. To make this easier we have included the dates and the locations of our shows during our tour. Now you don't really have an excuse to NOT be at the ALL the shows!

March 7th Basel Theater Arlecchino
March 8th Schaffhausen Kammgarn
March 10th Baden Merkker Kulturlokal
March 11th Winterthur Casinotheater
March 15th-24th Berlin IMPRO 2013 Festival
March 16th Berlin Ballhaus Mitte
March 25th Graz Orpheum
April 11th München Das Schloss
April 14th Mannheim TiG7
April 18th Osnabrück Haus der Jugend
April 20th Wiesbaden Wartburg
April 22nd Karlsruhe Z10
April 28th Hamburg Polittbüro
May 1st Leipzig nato
May 3rd Oslo Det Andre Teatret
May 4th Oslo Det Andre Teatret
May 15th Würzburg Jugendkulturhaus Cairo
May 17th Istanbul Kadikoy Terminal
May 18th Istanbul Kadikoy Terminal
May 22nd London The Miller, London Bridge
May 25th London The Nursery, Southwark
May 29th Berlin Ratibor
May 30th Berlin Ratibor


The FACEBOOK event LINK

The CRUMBS in Europe WEBSITE

A Map of Europe LINK

The Berlin IMPROV Festival WEBSITE

We had a CRUMBS photoshop contest. Here are the winners. First place goes to BEN.

Second place goes to Katie.

Oh look, a weird picture of Princess Diana on a wooden log at the dinner theatre in Winnipeg.

Oh look, a picture of me dressed as a Priest for a film shoot.

What's this? Dj Hunnicutt can not only mix amazing music, he can also mix amazing cocktails.

Okay, now aren't you glad that you read this? Of course you are, now start planning to go see all our shows in Europe!

CRUMBS in Bremen

CRUMBS again had a stop in Bremen on our tour. Last time we were here we had the amazing time at a 1200 year old fair. It was like a better version of the Red River Ex. We ate great food (corn on the cob, fried mushrooms, crepes, potato pancakes) we won prizes (for shooting guns at targets. Lee happens to be a sharpshooter). This year however, there was no fair while we were there. So we had to just do a show and not have the fun of a 1200 year old fair. Good thing our hosts Gunter and Nicole are so nice. Next time though, we're gonna try and make sure there's a fair going on.

The show was inspired by “Washroom Attendant” (AKA Toilet Lady) and “Wedding Ring” (AKA Marriage Hole... Just kidding, that's a totally different thing that I should probably not even mention).

The first story involved two buddies (Hank and Darryl). Darryl goes on lot's of dates because of the internet dating sites and has recently met someone special after having a lot of dates that didn't work out.

 

Hank, feeling lonely, and never having been on a date asks for Darryl's help. In fact, he figures that because Darryl has had so much experience, he should just have a date with the lady that Darryl has just dated. Hank doesn't really understand how these things work. After some hilariously disastrous dates and some hilarious misunderstandings about a number of things (his fear of horses, his opinion about blind people) he and Darryl have a fight.

 

It turns out that Darryl actually has a fear of his own, a fear of numbers. He and his lady break up (her name is Princess) and he checks himself into a number rehabilitation facility. When he gets out, cured, he finds that Princess and Hank have gotten engaged... with a wedding ring... a WEDDING RING!

*Some audience members maight have complained before the encore that wedding ring, while hinted at, wasn't ACTUALLY mentioned. Well, we made up for that in the encore.

The second story followed a couple of Washroom Attendants. In Europe it is quite common for public washrooms to have attendants. It is quite common for you to have to pay 50 cents to use the facilities. And it is quite common that the washrooms are just as dirty as if there was no such attendant.

Anyways, the attendants (Maureen and Barry) are just starting to get to know each other, which it turns out is against the rules of the washroom attendant book of conduct. Maureen it turns out is a bit of a rebel and attends to the needs of the public at washrooms out of a natural and intuitive instinct. Barry it turns out is actually studying Micro-Nuclear-Physics, actually trying to develop really tiny nuclear bombs to fight against insects.

 

Barry turns down Maureen's obvious advances, but then when she is threatened with losing her job for not following the rules, he stands up for her and they both get fired. Barry and Maureen end up running away together. Him to start a nuclear program in a small Middle Eastern country, and her to open up her own washroom business there.

Bremen. Good times.