Scott Capurro

I’ve just received these remarks about my comedy show in San Francisco. A guy I apparently met at the baths in Melbourne in 1996 contacted me, thrilled to be in SF during gay pride month, sporting a pink cowboy hat whilst he marched with the gay men’s chorus at that ‘Pride Parade’ people with their children still attend. He came along and watched my set a few weeks ago, at the SF Punchline, then he disappeared. Poof! I contacted him to ask what was up. I just wanted to know if I looked good. Ah, vanity!
Instead, I got this:
Dear Scott, Thanks for your email. I can understand you are curious why we didn’t hang round to catch up. We bolted from the show because we were both in a state of shock: I was embarrassed and Richard was, well, appalled. Much of the content of the show played to every old, outdated possible stereotype of being gay. Eg: Gay = sleazy, sexual predator Gay = aids Gay = child molester Etc etc In Aus we have had to fight long and hard for the mainstream community to understand that these things don’t hold true, so it was surprising to go to a show when they were being milked for laughs. Especially when, as far as a quick glance round the room could tell, most of the audience seemed straight. The next day our shock turned to anger and resentment: to us it seemed a throwback to some of the views we have fought long and hard to influence and change. I am not sure if this is news to you, or not. And no doubt the goal of the show is to shock people, and perhaps there are layers of irony, subtlety or nuances which we didn’t pick up. We don’t take serious pills, and enjoy satire and thought-provoking humour. But unfortunately we didn’t find this stuff funny. I did think about sending this feedback to you earlier as I thought you might be wondering why we didn’t hang round, but as I don’t really know you that well I didn’t. In view of your email I hope it does help you understand our reaction. Take care, and best regards, Tim
I know. He’s relentlessly stupid, or Australian. Take your pick. I should’ve ignored him and his large ears. But I was feeling restless. So I sent this:
Hey Tim, Thanks for the email. I looked you up on line and if you’re the lawyer from Melbourne then you’re NOT the Tim I’d hoped was coming to the show. The Tim I’d expected is blond and owns a boat and lives in Sydney. Do you know him? ‘Aus’ as you call it has such a compact population of gays. Anyway, if you say we’ve met before, I’ll take your word for it. You seem like a very sincere person.
About my material, which, I suppose, you’ve forgotten since we last met: My relationship with the audience is very personal, very intimate, and the stereotypes you mentioned are the types I’m trying to expose and satirize in my act. Sorry you didn’t get the joke. Odd the vast majority of the crowd did, but then mine is not your culture. Whether the audience was straight or not, I’m not sure. But if they were, perhaps their presence confused you and muted your response. Next time, there’s no reason to be frightened. In provincial towns a lot of straights might seem sinister. In San Francisco, really, that’s not the case. Our straights are a docile, easily controlled bunch, good humored and up for some laughs.
By the way, it’s customary, no matter what you thought of the show, to thank a performer for arranging tickets, and not wait for him to contact you wondering where you disappeared to.
OH, one other thing: Pink cowboy hats and the gay chorus? Now those are the stereotypes I’m fighting against.
Enjoy your far-away land.
Scott Capurro
PS: We met at the baths? Talk about stereotypical…

Hey kids, this just in from the San Francisco Weekly! A lovely reporter wrote this delicious bit about my show here. And what a great journey I’m having – a nurse in the front row of last night’s show identified my austism. Who knew? Free diagnoses are the best, because in America they’re the only ones I can afford. I’ve got asberger’s. I’m sure I’ve misspelled that, but it’s all new to me.

Bitter, Sweet
By Tara Jepsen
There’s always a time for a little Mars vs. Venus and a splash of Can’t We All Just Get Along? But it seems the current laff-seeking public is gravitating toward some fabulous weirdos and some deliciously sharp tongues. Perhaps it’s the Puritanical influence on so much of U.S. culture, or maybe most of you were raised by Scandinavian Lutherans. Regardless, there’s a psychic unburdening that goes along with hearing someone just say some messed-up, irreverent, hilarious stuff. If this is your gig, check out the lovely comedian Scott Capurro. He’ll give you some thoughts on the proper use of sex toys, and he’ll talk about being gay in a way that won’t be used in pamphlets for LGBT teens. This is not an event for hysterical reactionaries, but the place for smiling malcontents and all those who have moved far beyond the “take my wife — please” horizon line.

The ‘as the years go by’ line made me shutter. But I am pushing 48, hard. Have I been around the comedy scene in the UK forever? Or does it just feel that way? Anyway, this review feels good.

Comedy review: Scott Capurro

Published Date: 10 April 2010
By Brian Donaldson
The Scotsman
SCOTT CAPURRO ****

THE STAND, EDINBURGH
AS THE years go by, could Scott Capurro be losing his edge? Track down any review of any of his previous shows, from his 1994 Edinburgh Fringe debut Risk-Gay on through Fowl Play, Loaded and the Perrier-nominated Love and Affection Tour and you will more likely than not read about an audience member or 20 “storming out”.

On Tuesday night, though, as he performed his current show Scott Capurro Goes Deeper, the clatter of the exit door behind another shocked customer was not heard once. Either the San Franciscan is toning it down these days or his audience was too broad-minded. Or, Capurro concluded, having paid for a ticket, there’s no way a Scottish crowd would leave without getting value.

But if you thought he has stopped culling all those sacred cows, you’ll have to think again. There are extended, arguably death-defying sequences about the Koran in this show, stacks of gags about his lustful feelings for Jesus, and plenty of borderline shout-outs for the McCanns, Fritzl, the Holocaust, Diana, Christopher Reeve and Obama.

While no-one in the crowd deemed any of this stuff sufficiently offensive to head for the safety of the street, they did little to prevent themselves from becoming a target: chief among them a Texan who had left her hubby in Houston while she hunts for the Loch Ness Monster.

Whatever anyone thinks of Capurro, there’s little argument that he is a technically-gifted comic with each barb softened by a comedic hug before the set-up empathy has acid poured all over it again. And when it comes to stretching stand-up comedy’s boundaries, Scott Capurro really does go much, much deeper than the rest.

It’s just a bit from the review for She Stoops to Comedy. A bit about me. Printed before Christmas, but I’m only just adding it to my site, which just goes to show you:
A.) How bored I am in cold, lonely London, and
B.) How busy I was in lovely SF. I miss the cast. And the burritos. And the yoga. Whenever I bring up yoga in London, people smirk. Just a bit. Or maybe they’re burping. Hard to say with the locals.

That leaves us with Capurro’s Simon, who delivers the show’s most electrifying moment. Could it be significant that the play’s best speech is also its least funny one? At about the 60-minute mark, Simon gets the stage to himself, and his monologue is worthy of Jaques’ darkest complaints. Identifying himself as “the stereotype of a self-loathing homosexual,” he excoriates himself for embodying, despite his best intentions, even the most tiresome gay clichés. He retires drunkenly to his hotel room, waking in the morning to take another handful of HIV meds. Set amidst a riot of sexual shenanigans, the monologue is a bleak retreat from the play’s otherwise comic vision: Greenspan, like his heroine, might just be well-suited for tragedy.

And it’s about friggin’ time. It’s doing well cuz I didn’t write it. Anyway this is the third review I’m putting up here. Read below for the first two. It’s all happening at OUR theatre. Be there or be, I dunno, dead inside.

CHEERS!
She Stoops to Comedy raises the bar for holiday theater
BY ROBERT AVILA
Wednesday December 9, 2009

It’s hardly news, but holiday shows can be fairly dreary treats. Given such periods of seasonal affective disorder as the theater may present, it’s a genuine surprise and pleasure to discover the wit and wile strutting the boards at SF Playhouse — tucked into a far corner of Union Square somewhere just north-by-northwest of that big Christmas tree — where the season offering is a sparkling production of David Greenspan’s She Stoops to Comedy.
Mercifully, the plot has nothing to do with yuletide or smiling through a bad case of rickets. Instead, it concerns a lesbian stage actress named Alexandra Page (male actor Liam Vincent) who decides to disguise herself as a man and try out for Orlando in a summer stock production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in order to play opposite her estranged lover, Alison (Sally Clawson), in the part of Rosalind — another cross-dresser twice over since Shakespeare’s character is a woman disguised as a man in a part played, historically, by a boy.
Playing opposite, in short, is just what Alexandra does, convincing everyone she is a man — including a besotted middle-aged gay actor named Simon Lanquish (Scott Capurro) — while spying on and ultimately seducing, in seemingly old heterosexual fashion, her charmed lover and costar.
Meanwhile, other romances abound in ways at least as complicated: Alexandra’s ambitious young director Hal (Cole Alexander Smith) and creatively frustrated assistant-and-girlfriend Eve Addaman (Carly Cioffi) balance careers and romance in precarious turn. And a highly affected actress named Jayne Summerhouse (Amy Resnick) seeks to rekindle an old flame with her seeming-opposite of the same sex: the literally down-to-earth archeologist Kay Fein (Amy Resnick) — an encounter that promises sparks, not least because it features only one actor.
But gender, identity, and blocking aren’t the only challenges put forth by Greenspan’s play. In She Stoops to Comedy, even the script is up for grabs, rewriting itself as it goes along through the caprice of characters who are liable to speak to, as much as from, their respective roles. (Kay, for instance, changes decades and job titles with relative ease.) Cunningly employing Shakespeare and other literary touchstones — in particular a 1910 play by Ferenc Molnár called The Guardsman — She Stoops traipses over aesthetic and even philosophical ground after its carefree but astute fashion. It’s a self-consciously theatrical enterprise that gleefully eschews expectations, squirming pleasantly under the usual theatrical artifice as if looking to satisfy a really good itch.
A dazzling bit of low-key stagecraft, She Stoops is a tall order for any company. In director Mark Rucker’s staging, the action comes off as a pitch-perfect balance of wit and wonder, a loving riff on acting, connecting, and the role of the imagination in art and life. Heady and hilarious at once, it’s metatheater with a pulse, sporting plenty of fine opportunities for an exceptional cast — beginning with Liam Vincent, whose poise and subtlety in the lead are perfection — and including a couple of memorable scenes of actorly pyrotechnics exquisitely realized by Capurro and Resnick, respectively.

And this from the Bay Times. OH! Read the lower entry first. It tells you all you need to know.

Similarly, as the “stereotyped aging homo” who comes on to the disguised Alexandra, Simon (Scott Capurro) begins as “Silent Simon,” his thoughts narrated by Jayne, only to launch into one of the most wrenching monologues of the play, in which he laments his performance of homosexuality in light of his AIDS, his aging, his adherence to a scripted portrayal of gays. “Who wants another play about him?” he asks.

She then calls my monologue a ’showstopper’. That’s sweet. Though no one jumped out of their seats or anything. And when I read this 3-pager that I do, I thought it was hilarious. Self loathing and seething with anger, about AIDS and cruising teenagers and career failure. I figured, they hired me cuz this has loads of laughs. THEN THE ROOM WENT SILENT. Guess I was wrong, and I’m man (?) enough to admit it.
And now I’m a serious actress. Seriously. I am you guys!

Hey!
Here’s a review from the Chronicle (the biggest paper in this one-pony town) for the play I’m in. That’s where I am, btw, in case anyone in the UK even wonders. I’m in SF, legitimizing myself as a real actor. In this play I’m an aging bitter actor with AIDS. That’s the character, not me, and the research was intense. I don’t have AIDS yet – give me time, I’ve only been in SF for three weeks.
It’s 4 stars. The review. IT IS! For some reason the icon this paper uses doesn’t transfer. More to come, hopefully. Stars. Reviews. AIDS. All the fun stuff.
Read on. NOW!

She Stoops to Comedy: Comedy. By David Greenspan. Directed by Mark Rucker. With Liam Vincent, Amy Resnick, Sally Clawson et al. Through Jan. 9. SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. 90 minutes. $40. (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. David Greenspan has more fun writing his characters into hilarious meta-theatrical complications in “She Stoops to Comedy” than anybody has a right to. He’s not as successful bringing his backstage high jinks to a conclusion, but by then the SF Playhouse West Coast premiere that opened Saturday has delivered so much laughter that it’s hard to care.

Taking off from Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines, Greenspan explodes gender and identity notions with infectious glee. But that’s just for starters. “Comedy” is a romp through every aspect of theater, from overblown egos and out-of-town romance to on-the-fly rewrites. It’s a terrific workout for a very good cast, culminating in a tour-de-force two-character solo by the sublime Amy Resnick.

Just as Shakespeare wrote for boys playing girls who dressed up as men, “Comedy” uses a man as its female lead. Diva Alexandra Page (Liam Vincent in the role Greenspan originated), worried about losing her lover Alison (Sally Clawson), disguises herself as a man to play Orlando opposite Alison’s Rosalind in a summer theater “As You Like It.”

Right, that’s a man playing a woman pretending to be a man to woo a woman playing a woman who pretends to be a man. Which doesn’t include the gay actor (stand-up comic Scott Capurro) who falls for Alexandra’s male persona or the pretentious actress (Resnick) coming on to Alison – until her former lover (also Resnick) shows up, as either a lighting designer or an archaeologist (as the script changes).

There’s considerable added inside-theater comedy, from the way Greenspan puts the plot of Ferenc Molnár’s “The Guardsman” through the “As You Like It” wringer to nods to everyone from Charles Ludlam to Virginia Woolf. Then there are the backstage problems of independent filmmaker turned first-time stage director Hal Stewart (Cole Alexander Smith) and his lover Eve Addaman (Carly Cioffi), who always says her surname first (try it out).

Director Mark Rucker navigates Greenspan’s heady shifts of reality and scene retakes with an ease that lets the hilarity flow. Vincent anchors the comedy with a perfect dry, wry wit, and Capurro shines in a sadly funny monologue about gay roles.

Everything builds to the scene between Resnick’s two roles, which she executes with show-stopping finesse. It’s a hard act to follow. The way “Comedy” peters out to its “Guardsman” resolution is a bit of a letdown, but the joy of its best moments prevails.

Here’s the review from Chortle for my chat show, which appeared during its maiden run at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The new run, starting October 1, will be even more exciting. This review fills you in, come see it, I like the show. The new line up will appear on my site soon.

If any chat show is only as good as its guests, Scott Capurro’s new live venture looks promising indeed, with the likes of Ken Livingstone, Julian Clary, Brain Paddick and Graham Norton all lined up to join him at South London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
But guests are only half the equation, and Capurro wouldn’t perhaps be most commissioning editors’ first choice as host, particularly when causing offence is a paralysing fear. Not only is his stand-up act so thoroughly filthy that he’d make the pre-Sachsgate Jonathan Ross look like Mother Theresa’s maiden aunt, but also his persona is so narcissistically self-centred that you’d think it would be well nigh impossible for anyone else to get a word in edgeways.
It turns out that he can be generous with the limelight, and in conversation with Jo Caulfield prompted plenty of anecdotes about her family – especially her brother the Catholic priest (cue lots of sniggering paedophile gags) – and opinions on the perceptions of female stand-up. This opening segment was amicable and moderately entertaining, but with his lascivious wit neutered, there was little to separate Capurro from any other attentive and confident interviewer.
In the second section, all changed. As Capurro interviewed cabaret artist Dickie Beau – following his mesmerising and moving turn lip-synching to a tragi-comic interview with a drunkenly defiant Judy Garland – the tables were turned as the host did more talking than his subject. We learned much about Capurro’s hang-ups, family and relationships – all told with the deliciously biting wit for which he is rightly known, but the talk-show aspect was all-but forgotten as the catty San Franciscan held court.
The balance was better with Jerry Springer: The Opera composer Richard Thomas – not a natural on stage but clearly an interesting interviewee, and the devilish star of that controversial production, David Bedella, who sang powerfully but gave nothing away in conversation.
In the final section came the man most had surely come to see: Graham Norton, hotfooting it from his changing room in La Cage Aux Folles. Waiting for him to travel in from the West End made for a long night – but the wait was worth it, as the ever-charming Irishman proved as cheekily entertaining as an interviewee as he is as an interviewer, regaling the audience with his impishly indiscreet showbiz confessions and pithily expressed opinions on the nature of his job.
The banter here flowed the easiest it had all night; with the well-matched Capurro and Norton batting the conversation back and forth like Forrest Gump playing ping-pong. This might have been Capurro’s first bash at a talk show, but by the end he had found his feet.
The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, however, might not have been the best choice of venue for such an experiment. Much of the well-lubricated audience at this predominantly gay bar, perhaps more used to seeing rambunctious cabaret here, found it difficult to keep schtum, proving distracting at best, disruptive at worst.
But maybe they – like Capurro himself – haven’t yet had time to quite adjust to the mechanics of this format.
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
March 19, 2009

Camden Fringe: Scott Capurro Goes Deeper
6th August 2009 until 8th August 2009 – 9 pm,
Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8EH

If you’ve seen Scott Capurro before you’ll find it hard not to laugh on learning that this Camden Fringe show at the Roundhouse is entitled Goes Much Deeper. That, you see, is what the gay San Francisco comic does. He likes to probe. And ask questions other people don’t dare: Are kids ever really missing? Does swine flu prove the Jews are right? When will Obama wipe off the make-up? Are we using the death penalty in Texas on the right people? Charmingly uncouth, rip-roaringly camp and unflinchingly provocative, Capurro has certainly toned down a notch since being banned on Australian airwaves for “polluting minds” – but only a little. He’s still “vaingloriously poisonous” (The Scotsman) so much so that even The Mirror recently labelled him “evil” and called for his extradition. Audiences find themselves insulted and seduced in equal measure and you may at first laugh out of pure discomfort. But by the end you should appreciate the endearing, nay avuncular side of much of Capurro’s often important work, which indeed goes much deeper than mere shock value.

I’m number one Critics’ choice pick in Time Out magazine. And in the London Paper. And in the Ham and High! (Not sure what that is, but it sounds delicious.) The show, Scott Capurro Goes MUCH Deeper, is meant to be fun and frothy till then end when I, metaphorically, gouge out my own eyes.
The venue, the Roundhouse, is really lovely. But don’t expect air conditioning, or trains that run on time. Brit weather…oy vey. Let’s not spend too much time on it, it’s been done done done but it’s freakish how, when it rains, it’s hot, and when it’s really sunny, it’s freezing. Part of the ironic charm the English pride themselves on I guess. But you’d think they’d have the trains-in-the-rain thing down by now. When the tracks are wet, everything stops. Maybe it’s the english version of a fiesta, only you’re on a smelly, damp train. Where’s the hammock? Where’s the salsa? Where’s the tequila??? And where is that smell of poop coming from? It had better be me!

About my current show at the Roundhouse in Camden, Time Out writes:

There are some topics which just aren’t suitable for comedy. Luckily for us Scott hasn’t worked out which ones they are yet. He’s filthy, camp and utterly fearless. There’s also a huge amount of heart and intelligence at work in this show if you really listen carefully to what he’s actually saying.

See you there.
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