Jukebox Stories
by The Scene on March 7th, 2008
We headed over the Impact Theatre, which is conveniently located in the basement of the Berkeley pizza parlor, yesterday evening and saw Jukebox Stories: The Curse of the Creamy Foam and we have to say that were mightily impressed.
Jukebox Stories is a collaboration between storyteller/playwright/blogger Prince Gomolvilas and singer/songwriter Brandon Patton and takes the form of a slightly post-modern revue where Prince would tell a story or do a monologue and then Brandon would sing a song. Some of the stories and songs were chosen at random by audience members and some, well, Prince and Brandon made doubly sure they got in. Like Prince’s story about how he wrote a an essay for AOL about the level of gayness of High School Musical 2 (”on a scale of 0 to gay, it’s off the charts”) that caused a firestorm of controversy. Apparently, the meanest thing you could ever do to a 13 year old girl is to suggest that Zac Efron might be more than casual acquantences with Dorothy. Dude is hilarious. Brandon is no slouch either. He is easily one of the most inventive acoustic guitar players we have ever had the pleasure of watching work. He’s a good songwriter too, don’t get us wrong, seamlessly switching back and forth between goofy humor and heartfelt emotional heft the way he does is no easy feat, but some of the stuff he did on that acoustic we ain’t seen nobody do before.
The set is dressed up to look like someone’s college dorm room, or someone’s first “on their own” apartment. You can imagine that if you went into the bathroom the roll of toilet paper would be sitting on top of the toilet and not in the toilet paper holder (if you catch our drift). The effect is the creation of an intimate atmosphere where the line between the audience and the performers is intentionally blurred. There are contests, we were the lucky winners of a box of Darjeeling Limited promotional tea bags, and a couple musicians, from a band called Paper Mache that Prince and Brandon has discovered at an open mike night played a couple songs. Laid back, unpretentious and fun.
Jukebox Stories: Curse of the Creamy Foam runs at the La Val’s Subterranean Theatre in Berkeley until 3/22.
on February 1st, 2009 at 6:26 pm
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