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New Year's Eve Joke Show

2016 · Playhouse on the Square, Jacksonville

Billed as "an emotional laxative" for everything the year just past had put everyone through, the 2016 New Year's Eve Joke Show was the second annual edition of this end-of-year tradition at the Playhouse on the Square in downtown Jacksonville. Ken Bradbury directed and "wrote" the show, freely confessing in his note to the press that he had stolen the jokes "from only the best sources — if I'm going to pilfer other folks' material then I want it to be the best."

The format was simple and warm: a cast of familiar local performers entered to music, completed "the toughest task of the night — finding their stools," and proceeded to fire off rapid rounds of one-liners and gag-and-answer routines organized loosely into categories such as "Doctors!" After the prior year's near sell-out, the show returned with a clean bill and an early 5 p.m. curtain so that the audience — and, Bradbury joked, his aging cast — could still make it to their New Year's celebrations and to bed on time.

Alongside the stool-bound one-liners, the evening reached back to vaudeville with classic crosstalk bits: a relentless "Jacksonville Censor" interrupting a singer's increasingly sanitized rendition of "Ol' Man River," a fast-patter peanut-and-popcorn vendor heckling the band, and a string of "Doctor! Doctor!" exchanges punctuated by the cast's collective "Ba-dump-Chh!"

Cast

Rich and Laurie McCoy founded the Playhouse on the Square with a dream of bringing affordable quality theatre to Jacksonville, staging 39 productions in its first 44 months. Bruce Surratt began his stage career as Conrad Birdie in Ken Bradbury's long-ago production of Bye Bye Birdie and later performed with the Passavant Follies. Jeff Westerfield came up through theatre at Triopia and toured the Midwest with the Dutch Sometimes Theatre. Gary Scott is the local voice of WLDS/WEAI radio. Katie Phelps is a graduate of Bradbury's Triopia theatre program and a veteran of The Coonridge Players. Stephanie Soltermann, who accompanied on piano, teaches at Salem Lutheran School and is a familiar face on Jacksonville stages.

Production Notes

Bradbury, who appears in the program's mock biographies, claimed he was "forced to put tonight's show together since Rich McCoy still has some damaging pictures of him from Ken's high school career."