Seattle Stranger Review #4 : click here to return to main REVIEW page

The Cody Rivers Show: Review for Right Back Where We Finished

Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu, the two young men of the avant-comedy duo the Cody Rivers Show, are imagination dynamos. The pair—who won last year's Stranger Genius Award for theater—charm audiences with short sketches, monologues, and dance routines that constantly surprise and seem to be totally disconnected, but share a sympathetic resonance, a mood, that holds them all together. It's as if the two take long, deep walks through their brains, picking up scraps of memory (old people bickering, horse races, word problems, breakup conversations, nature documentaries), and wire them together into big, weird contraptions for the stage. Right Back Where We Finished is their 15th show in five years, and it's much like the other 14—like nothing you've ever seen.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying the Cody Rivers Show is odd and deeply funny and totally worth your while.

In Right Back Where We Finished, Connor and Mathieu jump from nerdy kids furiously playing rock-paper-scissors to a fake documentary about a man who has a snake that drives a forklift to two dudes playing ping-pong while arguing about whether either "owes me one." In one of the best sketches, a bureaucrat (Tillman) rides out from Kansas City to confront a frontiersman (Rolly) about all the regulations he's been violating [...] Then they're off to a whole new universe about a prairie dog and ants fighting over a candy bar, told entirely with pointing and compound nouns while the audience squeals and shouts with delight.

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