This Friday and Saturday: Small-Town Rumors and Chicken Tales!

This Friday and Saturday, one night only (each night), your second-favorite monkey bluegrass side project, THE HALF BROTHERS brings you a show of positively golden proportions featuring approximately 5/7ths of the members of "Awesome" and so many other people and things and objects and stuff that you will most likely explode in an icy ball of bacon-wrapped ham.

First of all, we've got a brand (spanking) new thing by Sgt. Rigsby And His Amazing Silhouettes, called The Epic of Gallus Domesticus. If you don't know what I'm talking about because you blacked out after the last Sgt Rigsby show you saw, maybe the picture there will remind you.

Yes, shadow puppets. And chickens. With a multitude of voices done by our own trumpeteer Evan Mosher and drummist Bort Kleisterton. Plus the accordion playing puppet master Rob Witmer mooing and quacking and "shaking a chicken" or two.

Annex Theater's own writer/raconteur Bret Fetzer (left) directed the show, and will also be on hand to read a few BRAND NEW fairy tales written just for this very special special evening.


Then we have punk marimba virtuoso Erin Jorgensen (right) who will debut new arrangements of Appalachian mountain gospel songs. I don't know how she does what she does, but it blows my mind every time. I think it has something to do with her yarn-ball mallets. Man would my cats love to get a hold of those.


And Erin will be bringing with her the sweet soul-saving singing of Sunday Services. Allah be praised!

AND!!!!! (Saving the best for last!) This show also features the unparalleled puppetry talents of the inimitable BEN LAURENCE. (Pictured here in last year's Broadway smash, the screwball action mime-opera comedy, Every Which Way But Noose.)

The Stranger gave the show a "Stranger Suggests", and tickets are already selling fast.

(Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave S, www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri–Sat at 7:30 pm, $12 adv/$15 door.)