last night's gig

Kids in the Hall Preview the New Show We’ve Promised Ourselves Will Air!

There’s something uniquely attractive about these women, isn’t there?Photo: Jed Egan


Scott Thompson set the tone early at the Kids in the Hall show at the Nokia Theatre Saturday. Delivering a monologue as the fabulous Buddy Cole, Thompson noted the hint of “incest, regret, and traffic jams” in the air. “The Pope must be in town!” His Holiness likely wouldn’t have approved of much of the show — a tight 90 minutes that revived numerous characters from the Kids’ past, from Mr. Tyzik, who crushed the heads of all the members of the troupe, to Chicken Lady, who had an orgasm onstage during phone sex.

Religion was a theme: Buddy Cole explored whether Jesus was gay (“He was Jewish, so he was already half-gay”), Bruce McCullough’s Gavin character talked to a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses (“Religion is for stupid people. It gives them something to do between scratching lotto tickets”), and Dave Foley used a time machine to travel to Germany, where he accidentally gave a young art student named Adolf Hitler the idea for hating the Jews. (As promised, Foley’s Satanic manservant Hecubus did not appear.) When the Kids in the Hall last toured six years ago, they re-created several sketches from their TV show verbatim. But this time it was virtually all new material — which makes us all the more excited for the mere possibility that it’s just a warm-up for that new TV project. —Joe DeLessio

Kids in the Hall Preview the New Show We’ve Promised Ourselves Will Air!