Performers of all stripes are taking to crowd-funding in order to get their special brands of fun happening in Philly.
Philly can have its CAKE
Philly is the proposed first stop on the CAKE Comedy Tour featuring comedians Carrie Gravenson, Abbi Crutchfield, Kaytlin Bailey and Erin Judge.
Out comedian, actor and writer Judge said the upcoming trek is something the quartet has done before, but this is the first time they are trying to crowdfund the road trip.
“We started touring together as a group five years ago,” Judge said. “Kaytlin Bailey got it in her head that she wanted to do a tour of the Southeast and we did Charleston and Raleigh and a bunch of cities like that. We loved touring together so much that we kept it going for all this time.”
Judge said the comedians’ individual styles work well together.
“We’re all really different from each other on stage,” she said. “Even though we’re all women in a similar age, we come from different parts of the country and have different perspectives. We have a great time in the car and working out all the details. I love working with these other three women because I know I can rely on them. I know that they are always going to be funny. They are always going to work hard and they are always going to be super-fun to hang out with.”
Standup comedy tends to be a heterosexual white-male-dominated field and as a result, it’s rare to see a comedy event with more than one woman on the same bill.
Judge said this type of crowd-funded tour helps them put together and market a show audiences wouldn’t normally see in an average comedy club.
“I don’t know if we ever left the era where comedy clubs are reluctant to put two women on a show, let alone four,” she said. “There’s a lot of great clubs around the country and we love to perform at comedy clubs, but we do tend to draw an audience that is alienated by comedy clubs. We love that too. We love to have people who love to go out to the comedy club in their city and we love having people who want to see a different kind of show because we really are the nexus of both things.
“A lot of times we work with a charity in the city and we’ll get bunch of people that are coming to support the breast-cancer charity or the domestic-violence charity that we are working with and there are many people who have never been to a comedy club before,” Judge added. “The typical stereotype of a comedy club is that the comic can be aggressive and some people are afraid of being picked on. We’re pretty chill and gentle with our audience, but we also are great for comedy fans. We’re trying to do something different but we’re really funny also.”
Outside of the tour, Judge is putting together a comedy festival focused on female performers in Boston. Last year, Judge, who identifies as bisexual, wrote a book whose main character is bi.
She said she’s eager to bring her work back to the Philly region.
“I’ve been out in L.A. for two years and I’m excited to get back to the East Coast in April and May.”
The CAKE Comedy tour comes to Philadelphia April 24. For more information, visit www.cakecomedy.com.
Let us out!
Another crowd-funded event launching in Philadelphia is the “1990s Breakout,” Philly newest escape room.
The project is the idea of James Bradford and “Pirate” Pebbles McWhorter, who have a decade of event design, hosting, promoting and planning experience between them.
The pair wanted to put their own spin on the popular entertainment phenomenon.
“Pebbles and I are big fans of the escape-room thing,” Bradford said. “It’s kind of blowing up everywhere. We’ve done them all here in the Philly area and we’ve enjoyed most of them. But we felt like a lot of them put a ton of focus on making the puzzles as hard as possible, which of course is great because you don’t want to go to an adventure room and sail through it in 20 minutes. We thought, We have to come up with an escape room that has an immersive theme that everybody is going to really get into. We knew there was an ‘Escape the 1980s Room’ in Philly and we thought it was really rad. We thought, Well, no one seems to be coming up with another decade-themed one and we are definitely products of the 1990s. It was by far the baddest era for us. So we started there.”
They’re counting on the queer community to help them reach their funding goal for a March 1 launch.
“If our GoFundMe campaign goes really well, then a March launch is totally doable,” he said. “It’s geared towards everybody, definitely, but a big part of the 1990s for us was the fact that queer culture started mainstreaming. It was a really exciting time for the queer community and we’re definitely incorporating some very queer-forward elements into the room. Drag culture will be represented. The Riot Grrrl movement was a big deal. That wasn’t explicitly queer but I went to Lilith Fair, which was a lesbian free-for-all, at least for me. [The escape room is] not queer-specific but it’s important for us to incorporate it because the 1990s and queer culture go hand in hand.”
For more information on the “1990s Breakout,” visit www.1990sbreakout.com or www.gofundme.com/escapethe1990s.