When: Oct. 27 through Oct. 31The bad news? Well, there isn’t any. Not with the company’s eye-popping 84th cabaret event — but only its second in three years — debuting tonight with a scattershot mix of comedy, theatre, music, improv and dance. The local performing arts community is never more interesting than when Atomic Vaudeville is running at full volume, as the company co-founded in 2004 by Britt Small and Jacob Richmond almost always bucks convention.
Atomic Vaudeville decided against staging The Rocky Horror Picture Show this year, which had become its default, albeit expensive, annual spring production. The company decided instead to stage “its own campy musical,” The Batshits, which is built around the talents of its many associated musicians, composers, writers, and actors. “We were thinking our audience would go with us on that,” Small said with a laugh.
A difficult two years, during which the majority of Atomic Vaudeville’s output was presented online, gave the company time to retool. Richmond exited the company he co-founded shortly before the pandemic began, and the online programming provided Small and her team with an area of focus while the task of restructuring Atomic Vaudeville got underway.