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COLDTOWNE TOURCO
ColdTowne Theater’s resident comedians have performed and taught improv all
over the country, including at some of the world’s most famous comedy institutions -- The Second City, iO, the UCB, and The Annoyance Theatre. We have
won every major comedy award Austin has to offer, and have performed at every
major comedy festival in North America.
ColdTowne Theater’s Tourco can provide a completely customizable comedy show
for your company or organization. Need a clean show? Not a problem. Want
audience participation? You’ve got it. Want us to make you laugh? We’ve got you
covered!
Contact us for rates and more information.
PAST VENUES
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COLDTOWNE THEATER • coldtownetheater.com • 4803-B Airport Blvd Austin, TX 78751 • [email protected] • (512) 524-2807
ABOUT COLDTOWNE THEATER
ABOUT COLDTOWNE THEATER
“...one of the breakouts this year...carved out a comedy reputation for itself...”
– Austin 360
“...a fiercely enjoyable brain warp of a time.”
–Austin Chronicle
“The city’s number-one comedy theater...”
–The Austinist
Best Comedy Group `06, `07 & `08
– Austin Chronicle
Best of Austin Readers Poll
The ColdTowne Theater is Austin’s main stage for alternative comedy, featuring
improv, sketch and standup shows Thursday through Saturday that showcase the
brightest, hardest-working comedians in Central Texas.
ColdTowne’s resident comedians are three-time winners of the Austin Chronicle’s
Best of Austin Readers Poll for Best Comedy Group and have appeared all over the
country at festivals, on college campuses, and at house parties. ColdTowne Theater
AWARDS
2008 Best Comedy Troupe, Austin Chronicle Readers Poll - ColdTowne
2008 Critic’s Choice, Austin Chronicle - Lovey and Lovey
2008 Frontera Fest, Best of Fest - Lovey and Lovey
2008 Best Improv Troupe, The A-List - Look Cookie
2007 Frontera Fest, Best of Fest - The Frank Mills
2007 Best Comedy Troupe, Austin Chronicle Readers Poll - ColdTowne
2007 B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Improv Ensemble - ColdTowne
2006 Best Improv Group, The Austin Chronicle Readers Poll - ColdTowne
2006 Frontera Fest, Best of Fest - McNichol & May Present: Great Americans
2006 Lone Star Sketch Festival Best of Fest - Lovey and Lovey
2006 B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Improv Ensemble - The Frank Mills
APPEARANCES
Southern Improv Festival, Harrah’s Casino, iO West, iO Chicago, ComedySportz (Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland,
and Dallas), Louisiana State University, the Dirty South Improv Festival, Austin’s Frontera Fest, Phoenix Improv
Fest, Chicago Improv Fest, Twin Cities Improv Fest, Toronto Improv Fest, West End Comedy Theater (Dallas),
the Del Close Marathon (New York City), Out of Bounds Improv Festival and Miniature Golf Tournament (Austin),
Alamo Drafthouse (Austin).
COLDTOWNE THEATER • coldtownetheater.com • 4803-B Airport Blvd Austin, TX 78751 • [email protected] • (512) 524-2807
COLDTOWNE THEATER
PERFORMERS AND SHOWCASES
COLDTOWNE
Coldtowne formed in March of 2005 in New Orleans. Since moving to Austin
after Hurricane Katrina, ColdTowne have established themselves as an indispensable Austin comedy institution, and have been named “Best Comedy Group”
in the Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin Readers’ Poll three years running. They
also run ColdTowne Theater and ColdTowne Conservatory, and have trained and
performed with iO (formerly Improv Olympic), The Second City, The Annoyance
Theatre, and The Upright Citizens Brigade. ColdTowne has performed across the
country, including at the Dirty South Improv Festival, Austin’s Frontera Fest, and
the Phoenix, Chicago, and Toronto Improv Festivals, as well as at the Del Close
Marathon in New York City and Austin’s Out of Bounds Improv Festival.
THE FRANK MILLS
The Frank Mills are actors living in Austin who have trained and taught at some
of the world’s most famous comedy institutions, including Second City, Boom!
Chicago, Improv Olympic, and The Annoyance Theatre. They are the 2006 B.
Iden Payne award winners for Outstanding Improv Ensemble and have twice been
named Best Improv Troupe by the Austin Improv Collective. They perform regularly at ColdTowne Theater and are mainstays of the ColdTowne Conservatory
faculty.
MIDNIGHT SOCIETY STOOL PIGEON
One of the first house troupes to emerge from the ColdTowne
Conservatory, Midnight Society have become a comic force
to be reckoned with. Their absurdly talented lineup is equally
adept at improv, sketch, and filmmaking, and they hold down
several regular slots on the ColdTowne calendar.
Stool Pigeon is one of ColdTowne’s signature shows and is rapidly becoming an
Austin institution. Every Saturday at 8pm, a rotating cast of the city’s best improvisers gather to twist the true stories of a special guest into hilarious scenes.
It’s the perfect marriage of anarchic comedy and the quirky personalities who
make Austin what it is.
PUNCHLINE
. . . AND MORE
ColdTowne’s open-mic standup comedy show is one of the
most popular in town, with both performers and audiences.
Comics get four minutes each in front of a laid-back, appreciative audience, and the results are predictably enjoyable for
everyone.
This is is just a small sampling of the talent on display at ColdTowne every week
of the year. We’re incredibly proud of the performers who play here, and of the
supportive and brilliantly talented comedy community that’s evolved around ColdTowne Theater. Come take in a show and see what all the fuss is about, but we
warn you . . . it’s easy to get hooked!
CONTACT US TODAY TO SET UP YOUR CUSTOM WORKSHOP OR SHOW!
COLDTOWNE THEATER • coldtownetheater.com • 4803-B Airport Blvd Austin, TX 78751 • [email protected] • (512) 524-2807
COLDTOWNE TOURCO
ColdTowne Theater’s resident comedians have performed and taught improv all
over the country, including at some of the world’s most famous comedy institutions -- The Second City, iO, the UCB, and The Annoyance Theatre. We have
won every major comedy award Austin has to offer, and have performed at every
major comedy festival in North America.
ColdTowne Theater’s Tourco can provide a completely customizable comedy show
for your company or organization. Need a clean show? Not a problem. Want
audience participation? You’ve got it. Want us to make you laugh? We’ve got you
covered!
Contact us for rates and more information.
PAST VENUES
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CONTACT US TODAY TO SET UP YOUR CUSTOM WORKSHOP OR SHOW!
COLDTOWNE THEATER • coldtownetheater.com • 4803-B Airport Blvd Austin, TX 78751 • [email protected] • (512) 524-2807
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magine, if you will, goofy
pedophiles lurching through
the night in an imaginary
stagecoach, stuffed cats
delivering speeches by
Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels, hurricanes that
decimate entire regions. …
Few improv troupes could
spin such darkness into
comedic gold, but somehow ColdTowne can. A band of quick-witted
upstarts who relocated to Austin
from New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, they found plenty of material in their harrowing experiences
during the storm, producing the
fiendishly fatalistic “Hurricanes Are
Funny” within two months of their
arrival in the Texas capital. Austin
got it (how could you not laugh at a
skit where two housemates are fleeing a hurricane, and one’s berating
the other for not cleaning the George
Foreman grill before evacuating?),
and the city quickly adopted ColdTowne as its own.
Now, the comedy troupe’s five
founders — Chris Trew, Tami Nelson,
Michael Jastroch, Justin York and
Arthur Simone — have their own theater space and comedy conservatory,
regularly playing sold-out shows as
a quintet (ColdTowne) or in various
configurations (Lovey and Lovey,
for instance, with just Nelson and
Jastroch). In less than three years,
the group has developed a semi-cult
following for its absurdist satire,
delivering delicious jolts and headily
leavened truths every weekend at its
lair off Airport Boulevard.
“New Orleans defiantly seems
to cultivate its own sort of dark
humor,” Nelson says about the influence of the Big Easy. “It’s because
death is a large part of the culture.
It’s everywhere ... the culture of
New Orleans incorporates death
in its celebrations, like jazz funerals, second lines. There isn’t the
same cautiousness of death there.
It can’t exist because living life that
big leads pretty quickly to death.
Big food, big celebration, big big
drinking. (ColdTowne) definitely
felt a freedom in expressing a dark
side of ourselves coming out of that
9 - & / 5"645*/".&3*$"/45"5&4."/
culture, but more than that, we are
comedians.
“We put the ‘ha ha’ in the place of
the ‘ouchie.’ ”
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earless and cocky by nature
(coming from New Orleans,
hello …) and made more fearless
by their ordeal that late summer of
2005, this wolf pack of pranksters
can infuse almost any taboo with
satire and humor. In fact, “ColdTowne” and “dark satire” could be
synonymous if it weren’t for the fact
that some of their audience-driven
improv is pure-D dada.
Rarely, if ever, does the troupe
resort to blue humor or potty jokes
— even though a lot of the material
can challenge the bounds of tastelessness (all truly innovative comedy does). And as time has passed,
they’ve done dozens of shows at
various locations across town, from
the Alamo Drafthouse, the Austin
Museum of Art and Spider House to
the new United States Art Authority, recently launched by ColdTowne
Theater’s landlord/patrons Conrad
Bejarano and John Dorgan.
Sinister material works for
ColdTowne, even though there’s no
rhyme or reason to it. Some comics
just have the timing or the chutzpah (or that certain arch of a brow)
to make horrendous things seem
hilarious. More than self-effacement
or the ability to poke fun at oneself
or society, in this case it’s vibe and
intellect, intuiting one’s audience
and knowing one’s onstage playmates as if they were family.
“I totally trust these guys,” says
Nelson, 32, whose “Lovey and
Lovey” duet with longtime friend
Jastroch took “Best of Fest” at this
year’s Frontera Fest. “I can look into
Arthur’s eyes across the stage and
know what voice is going to come out
of his mouth, or I can see into the
future with Chris Trew … and know
I’m going to be doing a scene about
‘blank’ with him in 30 minutes. We’re
just so well connected that it’s very
easy to play with them. Not to say I’m
not often surprised. I am.”
As the sole woman in the troupe,
Nelson has to wear a number of hats
and, perhaps more than the other
four, respond quickly and intuitively to whatever’s thrown her way.
She’s fluid, organic, rarely ruffled.
The rest of the gang say she’s like
ground zero to them — as in ground
control to Major Tom.
“It’s very strange, but (the combination of personalities) works
for us,” says Trew, 27, the group’s
youngest member and one of its
biggest comedic risk-takers; he’s
very physical, with a boisterous
and left-field wit. “It’s surprised me,
but it feels really nice. What keeps
us together is we all have similar
goals and share similar philosophies
behind improv.”
Jastroch, 30, interrupts to adds
his 2 cents’ worth, common among
this band of characters: “We’re all
so radically different in the ways
we approach it — maybe not the
underlying philosophy but the way
we approach performing and maybe
even living our lives — but it ends up
working really, really well on stage.”
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oldTowne does have very legit
bragging rights.
Since opening its theater in
October 2006, the group has infiltrated the local comedy scene, honing
improv skills each Saturday night at
its location next to I Luv Video. Over
the past two-plus years, the members have nabbed multiple kudos,
including four Frontera Fest “bests”
this year (“Best Improv Troupe” being one of them) and garnering the
Austin Chronicle Readers Poll nod
for same in 2006 and 2007, as well as
XL’s “Funnywriter for SketchComedy,” 2006 (honors went to Trew).
Simultaneously, the five have
created the popular ColdTowne Conservatory, which so far has enrolled
about 130 students in its five-level
improv/sketch/stand-up program
(several recent ColdTowne grads are
headed to New York in August for
an improv festival) and graduated 25
students. And by touring constantly,
the group has gained a national
reputation, Trew says.
“We’ve hit almost every major,
and minor, comedy festival in North
America over the past two years,
and people now know about us,”
he says. “… In Toronto last year, it
was like ‘I’ve heard good things are
going on down there.’ Or in Chicago,
which most people will say is the
mecca for improv, there are people
who are in the ‘in crowd’ and are
teaching at Second City who are
talking about wanting to move down
here because of what’s happening
here with the comedy scene, and
ColdTowne in particular.”
Comparing their Austin audiences
with those back in New Orleans
is like comparing chicken fried
steak to catfish couvillion. The two
couldn’t be more different, says Arthur Simone, 30, probably the most
experienced performer and actor of
the five.
“Here in Austin we’ve done a lot
of improv shows, and I can count
the number of times we’ve gotten
naughty (blue) suggestions on one
hand — on one hand with three
fingers cut off,” he says. “The Austin
audiences are just so open and
smart, and there is a different level
of interest in what people can accomplish on stage.”
Jastroch, the group’s “marketer/
communicator” and a former music
writer in New Orleans, nods emphatically.
“New Orleans is a very fertile
town for creativity but not as rich
a ground for getting things done,”
he says. “In New Orleans, we were
playing for, like, five people who’d
wandered in off the street half the
time. Or playing a sports bar in the
suburbs to drunk fishermen. … Our
first show in Austin (fall 2005), we
were not doing anything different,
but there were probably 50 people
in the audience and they actually
got what we were doing. I was like,
‘Maybe we should stop playing to
drunk fishermen. Maybe that’s not
our target audience.’ ”
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efore they could locate their
target audience in a city far
from their hometown, though,
the five (who’d been part of the eightmember, original ColdTowne in New
Orleans) had to locate one another.
Discussing the fateful weekend
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of Aug. 28, 2005, when Katrina bore
down on the Gulf Coast, heading straight
for the Crescent City, all five say they
never expected that Friday night show to
be their last in New Orleans. Afterward,
they each said good night, see you tomorrow. By Saturday afternoon, all five were
in various states of evacuation.
York, Jastroch and Nelson wound up
in Houston, while Trew docked in Dallas
and Simone in Shreveport, La. Within
a week after the hurricane, the five had
convened in Austin for an improv show.
They wanted York to join them full time
in their adopted city, but the 30-year-old
who often plays the group’s straight man
had family business to attend to. He returned to New Orleans for another eight
months, until the four lured him back to
Austin with the promise of a theater and
conservatory of their own.
Early on, the four had decided to make
it work in Austin. Soon after the storm,
Trew, Simone, Jastroch and Nelson gathered at a restaurant near the University
of Texas, and all agreed that everything
had changed — their priorities, their
work, even what they found funny. They
decided to start fresh, and through a
friend of Nelson’s, met Dorgan and Be-
jarano. Amazingly, though they’d never
seen ColdTowne perform as an entity, the
two entrepreneurs offered the company
a makeshift home in a storage space next to their I
Luv Video store on Airport
Boulevard. Eventually, the
troupe persuaded Bejarano
and Dorgan to let them use
a second space connected
to the storage-cum-comedy
shop; that space is now being converted to a bar area
for the theater.
“When we evacuated to
different cities,” Simone
says, his tall body slumping
at the recollection, “here
I was in Shreveport at my
parents’ home, watching
my world collapse on TV,
and all I could think is,
‘I want to be with these
people; they’re my family,
as well.’ ”
Trew says the troupe’s
re-forming was natural and
unexpected.
“When we were in New
Orleans, it wasn’t like this,”
he says. “ColdTowne wasn’t
everyone’s number one priority. … We
all had our own things, our own lives and
jobs. It wasn’t like when I’d talk to somebody (back home) they’d say, ‘So what’s
ColdTowne doing?’ So when we came
here, part of that first week of us being
here was everyone finding out, ‘We’re in
love with each other … Let’s find a way to
get back together.”
And so it went.
-PPLJOHUPUIFGVUVSF
5
hough they’re not rolling in lucre — “we’re still looking for that
million-dollar donor,” York says
— they’ve managed to secure their home
through proceeds from the conservatory
and their roving Thursday-Saturday
shows, creating a bona fide buzz, regionally and nationally. Recently they’ve
begun looking to the future — and taking
their work to a new level for the first time
since they left South Louisiana. They
want ColdTowne to be Austin’s own Second City, and as part of that plan, they’re
finally getting things down on paper,
working on some screenplays and scripts
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and expanding beyond improv.
“These people inspire me,” says
Simone, the most eccentric and perhaps
funniest of the five. “They almost pimp
me at times into doing things I wouldn’t
normally do. … There have been times,
plenty of times, where for instance Chris
Trew dared me to do something — like
he dared me to do a one-person improv
show with my dog.” (Trew adds, “Actually I booked the show before he said
he’d do it.”)
“Buddy Daddy,” as the skit is now
known, won a “Best of the Week” at
Frontera Fest 2008. Now Simone and the
dog have taken to the road whenever
possible — most recently performing à
deux at the Twin Cities Improv Festival
in Minneapolis.
York says it’s often like that — someone in the company will sign someone
on for a wild ride, always knowing that
the unsuspecting player can pull it off.
He compares them to a wickedly witty
family, sibling-like, who can argue over
minor things like how long the stuffed
cat should be able to quote Goebbels
before it becomes truly bad form, or
just unfunny. Other than those types of
things, the group are of a piece, thick as
thieves. Kind of like the Three Musketeers — one for all and all for one.
“I think the thing that you’ll notice
about us, if you look at that whole conversation about the cat and Goebbels,
+6-:
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is, yeah, we had different ideas about
how this offensive Nazi speech could
go into (the show), but the similarity is
that there was no doubt that this cat was
going to make a Goebbels speech,” York
says. “As different as we are, we all knew
that. We each have a very dark sense of
humor and we also very much appreciate
just idiotic, lame comedy, as well.”
They discovered how well they could
synthesize those opposites through trial
by flood.
And though Nelson says there’s no
real how or why to it, the company innately knew that substituting “ha ha” for
“ouchie” back in 2005 would be critical to
ColdTowne’s post-Katrina survival.
“We’re comedians. We have to (laugh).
It’s a coping mechanism. It’s therapy.
It’s the only way we knew how to make
sense of this mind-numbing tragedy,”
she says. “Since we all escaped Katrina
relatively unscathed, it was like we
were given a free pass, a do-over. We
didn’t know what else to do, and moving
forward with all of our energy and love
and passion and strength made us feel
like we were doing something positive.
Something positive had to come out of
the storm for us.”
As it turns out, Austin helped them
find the upside to that storm, the silver
lining, if there can be such a thing. It’s
doubtful ColdTowne would call it the pot
of gold at the rainbow’s end, but at least
here it’s warm and safe and dry. And,
better still, A-Town gets ColdTowne;
they’re keeping each other weird.
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