August 05, 2023
This evening, I attended Esther's Follies, a sketch comedy show at the eponymous theater on the titular Sixth Street in downtown Austin. The show was filled with musical acts (including parodies of popular songs incorporating current events), magic tricks and illusions, and all sorts of sketches poking fun at local, statewide, and national culture and politics, among other things. The ensemble cast was fantastic, and I was entertained for the entire ninety minutes.
The show is a fixture in Austin's culture (according to my mom, at least), and, as they hinted at during the show, probably one of the few remaining longstanding bits of the classic quirkiness that "Keep Austin Weird" evokes in my mind. It takes place five times per weekend (once on Thursday, twice on Friday, and twice on Saturday) in a small theater with around one-hundred fifty seats (it was full tonight). The back wall of the stage consists of two large windows, and many sketches include cast members dancing or miming from behind the window on the sidewalk. There's a constant stream of people walking along the street, many of whom will look through the window and watch for a few beats, much to the amusement of the audience.
After the first couple of sketches, my mind immediately went to the obvious comparison with SNL. Both are sketch comedy shows which have been running for over forty years and contain entertaining political and cultural references, often set to musical numbers. Unlike SNL, however, I was able to attend in person, and the closeness of the theater made it even more engaging. It's also special that there's no way to watch it other than attending in person -- it isn't broadcast anywhere, we were prohibited from recording, and there isn't a limitless repository of skits on YouTube. Like SNL, I was impressed by how quickly they turned around news into new content -- some of the material was topical to the past week. I would definitely recommend that anyone living in or visiting Austin, who's interested in witty, clever sketch comedy, attend at least once!
When my mom describes her college experience at UT and mentions that she and her friends would go to dinner and then a show, this is the kind of program I imagine her and her friends having attended.