How to make a variety show for adults? When you're tired of half-baked cabarets that take you back to bad college theater, Radio Happy Hour is a giant boon. Sam Osterhout and the team behind this unpredictable show have nailed it: last week's guests--Chuck Klosterman with Craig Finn and Tad Kubler of The Hold Steady--were not only real performers, they were articulate and game for anything, even a reading of a goof-off play called Stabbed in the Ascot.
The audience took the dimmed lights in (Le) Poisson Rouge to signal that it wasn't too early to begin drinking. The play's first act saw a group of strangers, including characters called Craig Finn, Tad Kubler, and the writer Chuck Klosterman, take shelter from a snowstorm in a bar, the eponymous Ascot. They find a man in a sombrero who has been stabbed to death. One of the shelter-seekers must be the killer, but which one? The endearingly dumb one, the quiet geek, the eccentric older woman?
In the first intermission, host Sam got Craig, Tad, and Chuck chatting and laughing about their Midwestern backgrounds, former bands (before The Hold Steady, Craig and Tad formed part of Lifter Puller), and recent projects (Chuck is most recently the author of Eating the Dinosaur, a collection of pieces on pop culture and music). The musicians began to play, strumming and singing for two songs before strolling back to the center mics with the other actors to continue with Act II of the play, which finds the nervous suspects "fingering" one another for the crime more and more aggressively while exchanging alibis.
Several songs, jokes, audience quizzes, theatrical reveals, and insults later, the audience riots into applause. It's unclear if Radio Happy Hour is ever actually broadcast, but as a variety hour it still feels like one of the city's best-kept secrets.
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