Whatcom Independent Review - Review #2 - click
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by Marilyn Olsen
Cody Rivers back for Show #8
It just gets better
What can you say about two guys who routinely
run around on stage wearing water jugs strapped
to their backs, horned Viking helmets, home-made
super hero outfits? Who do entire skits either
without talking at all or in what seems, at least
in some form or another, to be French? Whose
props regularly consist of electric mixers, kayak
paddles and giant rubber balls? Who present
the warm-up vocalists with large, strange weeds?
If you ask the packed house at any Cody Rivers Show, what they’re saying
is MORE! MORE! Give us MORE!
Fortunately for Bellinghamsters, that’s just what Andrew Connor and Mike
Mathieu are planning to do, rolling out Show #8 at the iDiOM Theater next week
in their own strange, idiosyncratic style that has everyone from pre-schoolers
to octogenarians trying hard not to fall out of their seats laughing.
While the Cody Rivers Shows seem at first to be largely improv, it doesn’t
take long to realize that to these guys to these guys is actually a result of
a lot of hard work. As if it’s not enough that the stage they perform
on is small, the costume changes are frequent, and the break between skits takes
place in the dark, the performances are amazingly high energy with leaps, bounds,
pratfalls and slides combined with split second choreography that literally leaves
the audience saying out loud, “How in the world do they DO that?”
With a lot of practice, that’s how.
Mathieu studied creative writing and literature at Ohio Wesleyan University as
well as acting, playwriting and dance. Connor has a degree in theater, dance
and vocal education from the same college and is a founding member of Fresh Goods
Theatre in Seattle. Both have performed regularly at the Up Front Theater. And
would anyone be surprised to know both Mathieu and Connor were once members of
a group called the Babbling Bishops?
Mathieu and Connor have been together since September, 2004 as The Cody Rivers
Show, named after a famously imaginary country western singer with a very sad
past – something involving corn.
Though there’s no evidence of corn – well, the vegetable at least – in
the new show, audiences can expect no less than a conversation in a whole new
language (at least something that might be a language), rescue from a net involving
machetes, and the usual adventures with household appliances.
But is the subject of the skit ever really the point? Only after experiencing
Show #8 will anyone know for sure.
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