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In 1989, Brion Sprinsock, the entrepreneurial whiz kid of Santa Cruz, approached Laughing Moon Theatre with a proposition. He had been involved in the restoration of Santa Cruz after the disastrous Loma Prieta earthquake and wanted to do something to raise the community's spirits. Brion called on his favorite two funsters with a challenge: if Laughing Moon Theatre would create a full-evening show, he would produce it. The result was Laughing Moon Theatre's piece de greatest resistance, Sleep Tight. After its initial smash run in the Art Center Theater in Santa Cruz in the summer of 1990, Sleep Tight played in Marin County, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver, B.C. |
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| "Let's cut right
to the chase: Go and see Sleep Tight...It is quite simply one of
the most well conceived and executed, most entertaining evenings ever
presented on the small stage." --Kip Ward, Santa Cruz Good Times |
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| "Since the
Laughing Moon Theatre is being presented here by the Flying Karamazov
Brothers, it already has the comedy equivalent of the Good Housekeeping
squeal of approval." --Wayne Johnson, Seattle Times |
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| "Sleep
Tight belongs to a loose tradition of dream-logic comedy that
extends at least as far back as Alice in Wonderland. Fifties
surrealist Ernie Kovacs and Monty Python
animator-turned-filmmaker Terry Gilliam are two of the tradition's more
recent practitioners, but I'd guess that Laughing Moon's main influences
include early film pioneer Georges Melies and turn-of-the-century
cartoonist Winsor McCay." "...Despite their debt to fantasists of the past, Kolb and Venezia are never blatantly derivative. They acknowledge their influences with a polite tip of the hat, then let their imaginations run riot." "...Unlike traditional magicians, they never perform tricks for the sake of tricks. All their illusions fit into a multifaceted dramatic context that gives them great emotional resonance." --A.J. Mell, Seattle Weekly | |