madbaker | concert review

Went to see the A Mighty Wind show last night with the upstairs neighbors and

callistotoni last night. I figure this is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of show, because there is no way they'll be able to coordinate that many actors at once in the future.
It was really really really good. Longish review follows.

Sold out, which mildly surprised me. Quite a mixture of ages, from older folks to parents with kids to head-banging Spinal Tap fans.

Also more people from the show than I expected: Jonathan Steinbloom did the introductions. All of the film's New Main Street Singers (NMSS from now on) were there. I half expected a couple to be fill-ins. Jonathan also called out the tour's publicist, Amber. (The weirdly European PR ditz.) She was hysterically funny (okay, most of them were, but...) -- she announced that she was pregnant, as they had had a lot of fun on the tour bus and the baby could be anybody's; also, when Jonathan mentioned that the core of folk music is "folk", she stated "I love to listen to it when I folk."

The NMSS made lots of lame jokes that cracked them up. (Example: Cissy [Parker Posey]'s dad was one of the founders, so you could say that she has folk music in her genes - except that they've only ever seen her in a skirt. And then Jane Lynch explained it for the "benefit" of the audience as they all laughed heartily.) Cissy was relentlessly perky; that takes a huge amount of energy and is hard to maintain. Todd Boehner (pron. boner) talked about his wife having been a former actress in San Francisco, under the name "Misty Sunrise", I think; she explained that her first dog was named Misty, and she grew up on Sunrise Street... yes, those sorts of movies.

Then the Folksmen came out. Harry Shearer was in full drag and did the female body language beautifully. Dead-on parody of Mary from Peter, Paul and. Christopher Guest played his singer a bit more senile than the movie, but it was all still very good. They played the most songs, including "Loco Man" and ending with "Start Me Up". I saw them open for Spinal Tap when they only did three songs; Start Me Up laid me out then. It's still funny, even after listening to it on the soundtrack.

Mitch & Mickey only played about four songs. There was lots of hooting from the audience, some on target ("You rock my world" was from the film) but some not. Eugene Levy stifled some of it with a pretty standard improv put-down, "Did you just come up with that? It's pretty good." When delivered in his spacey voice, it worked better than a standard delivery.

They closed with "A Mighty Wind", of course. I sang along. So did lots of others.

Great fun, as you can probably tell from my blathering. 8)