-Matt Barbera, President of The Playground Theater
photo by Jason Creps
"A Money Kids show is not just a show...it's an experience."
-Kat G., audience member
photo by Tara MalikFeature article in The Chicago Reader:
That Would Be Even Funnier With Helmets and Tiny Heels
The Money Kids spin everyday nonsense into over-the-top funny business
January 31, 2008
It’s the last night of Chicago SketchFest, and a blond woman in the front row of a packed auditorium in the Theatre Building is killing time before the next set, e-mailing someone on her BlackBerry. As she punches away at the keys, the room goes dark and two stage lights begin to flicker in time to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
Candy Lawrence and Lauren Lapkus step out from opposite sides of the stage, wearing matching fake buck teeth and T-shirts with a picture of themselves sitting on side-by-side toilets. They make a beeline for the front row, gyrating right in the face of the blond woman, who is no longer messing with her phone but looking awkwardly around the room like, um, what’s happening? The girls continue past her, dancing from seat to seat, and the crowd ripples with laughter. Jumping back up on the stage like they’re jumping onto a couch, they introduce themselves as the Money Kids and mug for the crowd as they announce the title of the show: “Oh What, This Ol’ Show?”
The lights dim again, and when they come back up Lapkus and Lawrence are walking toward the stage from the back of the room, acting out a date that’s coming to an end. Lapkus, who plays the girl, invites Lawrence to come in for a drink. She excuses herself through the back curtain to slip into something more comfortable and comes back out wearing a black light-up wig, Coke-bottle glasses, and a prison uniform. She’s got a Freddy Krueger glove on one hand and starts caressing Lawrence’s face with a plastic gun. The blond woman is now laughing so hard it sounds like she might injure herself.
Lawrence, 27, and Lapkus, 22, formed the Money Kids just about a year ago, in November 2006, but they’ve attracted attention fast. Earlier this month they performed at a showcase of up-and-coming local acts for scouts from comedy festivals, including Montreal’s Just for Laughs. Matt Barbera, president of the Playground Theater—a nonprofit co-op with a mission to teach and promote improv comedy—booked the six acts on the bill. Last year three groups at a similar showcase were picked for the HBO Aspen Comedy Festival. Barbera thinks the Money Kids impressed the scouts. It’s not so much that they’re writing groundbreaking material, he says. “They are just amazing performers. You can’t help but watch them and they’re naturally stage charismatic.”
Lawrence and Lapkus met in 2005, when they both joined an all-female improv ensemble, the MISSfits, at the Playground. When the group disbanded about a year and a half later, the two decided it was time to come up with something of their own—and though they hadn’t spent much time together outside the group, they also decided to move in together. They found an apartment in Lakeview (with a view of the lake, even) and within a month they’d lined up their first gig.
Alana Johnston, who was in the MISSfits with Lawrence and Lapkus, says she was immediately drawn to what they were doing. “We would all be hanging at their house and they’d start riffing about anything, laughing their faces off, and the next thing you know they’d be up onstage doing just that—but with helmets and tiny heels.” She’s referring to a skit based on a video the women made, where they fight boredom by putting on children’s plastic high-heeled shoes, doing shots of booze, and threatening to shoot each other in the face. “They each keep a pair of tiny heels outside their bedroom doors, like princesses,” Johnston says. “It’s hilarious.”
As roommates, Lapkus and Lawrence pretty much develop material 24/7. But they never sit down and say “OK, it’s time to work on those scenes now,” says Lawrence—comedy just happens. “It happens all day long,” Lawrence elaborates. “It’s more like, ‘Oh my god, did you see that? That was funny. Write that down.’” Then they play with those ideas onstage until they turn into things that can be done over and over again.
“We’ll come up with a basic idea of a skit we want to do, and then we’ll come up with a character and create the scene from that,” says Lapkus. “It’ll be a random phrase or something and then we create sketches from that. For example, we came up with ‘a narcoleptic woman who goes on a power walk,’ then we developed a skit from that.”
They don’t rehearse a new premise much before trying it out on an audience—Lapkus says they like getting immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. But they don’t always abide by what the crowd tells them. “If we’re having fun with it, we’re gonna do it regardless if the audience thinks it’s funny or not,” Lawrence says. “We think it’s funny when the audience doesn’t laugh, we’re like, pffft!”
Lapkus, who grew up in Evanston, started taking classes at ImprovOlympic (now iO) while she was still in high school. She’s now a senior at DePaul, where she studies English, and performs as part of two iO comedy teams, the Darned and FELT, a troupe that uses puppets.
Lawrence, who’s from Middletown, New York, studied theater at Niagara University. After graduation she got an apartment in Buffalo and traveled more than an hour each way to take classes at Second City in Toronto. But the long commute took it out of her, and she moved to Chicago three years ago to immerse herself in the comedy scene, taking classes at iO and performing in a Playground group called Project Sunshine. To pay the bills she works in the office at the Briar Street Theatre, home of the local Blue Man Group franchise—taking tickets, answering phones, making popcorn, and the like.
Chicago was good for Lawrence, but it got great when she met Lapkus. “She was one of my favorite people in the MISSfits,” she says. “We both do a lot of character work and we gravitated to each other onstage,” she says. “We pretty much have the same style of comedy.”
A Money Kids set, which usually runs about 20 minutes, is a heaping handful of everyday weirdness cranked up to ten. They might make fun of fat kids, Brits, or Sex in the City; they sprinkle in bodily noises wherever possible and are prone to random acts of dance. “Anything weird we see, we’re gonna try to make a bit about it,” Lapkus says.
When I ask them if there’s anything they wouldn’t make a bit about, they have to ponder the question. “I was thinking AIDS,” Lawrence says. “But no, we’d probably put that in. We’re not that offensive though, and I think we appeal to a lot of people. So probably leukemia is as far as we’d go.”
Article in the Entertainment section of The DePaulia:
http://www.thedepaulia.com/story.asp?artid=2614§id=5
photo by Michael Malarkey
From TimeOut Chicago:
Our favorite scene from Lauren Lapkus and Candy Lawrence (a.k.a. the Money Kids) starts with a woman inviting her date up for a nightcap; we slowly learn, through a series of lines yelled while she slips into something more comfortable, that she's kind of a nut job shut-in (“I love sex! With people!). Then, the big reveal—she emerges wearing a granny gown and bottle-thick glasses. The scene works because both actors play it straight; this above-average sketch show could use a few more like it. But Lapkus and Lawrence have great sensibilities of what's odd-funny, and what's so-odd-it's-unfunny—and the majority of their show is the former.
http://www.timeout.com/chicago/event/comedy/313420/oh-what-this-ol-show
photo by Michael Malarkey
Centerstage Chicago says:
Candy Lawrence and Lauren Lapkus, the sketch comedy duo, Money Kids,
wear matching T-shirts with their pictures on them throughout their
revue "Oh What, This Ol' Show?" At first glance, this might seem like
a slightly narcissistic choice, but one quickly realizes that this is
absolutely appropriate. The show is all about them, in a good way.
Although they play many different characters, each scene is driven by
the obvious chemistry of their real relationship. These are two women
who clearly have enormous fun together, and they're explicitly
inviting the audience to be part of that fun.
The content of the scenes is for the most part good-natured silliness
of the highest quality; Lawrence and Lapkus take us to familiar
scenarios like a pre-teen slumber party and an awkward first date, but
imbue them with freshness and charm. They are so charming, in fact,
that the audience is lured comfortably into their darker material, the
highlight of which is when Lawrence plays an earnest clown, who must
entertain a terminally ill child played by Lapkus, and does a very bad
job. Another great darker scene presents them as two high school
friends, who reunite and catch up by talking over each other, self
absorbed and all but oblivious to each other's presence.
While the best sketch comedy often explores the realm of the bizarre,
this show never ventures far beyond the realm of the eccentric, which
gives it a very grounded and recognizable humanity. There's really not
much to this show than two friends screwing around, but since the
friends in question are this smart and funny, that is not a complaint.
http://www.centerstagechicago.com/theatre/shows/4892.html
photo by Jason Creps
THE BASTION says:
Have you ever seen two girls perform a sketch/video/improv comedy show? And have it actually turn out really, really entertaining?
Scratch that. We promised them an entirely different introduction.
IF YOU LIKE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, YOU'LL LOVE THIS SHOW.
But seriously, what starts with a freaky-deaky dance number, has high energy, well-rehearsed sketches, a dash of improv, and a handful of videos? "Oh What, This Ol' Show?" Wait, that's the answer, even though it's phrased as a question. Sure, the title is a cop-out as opposed to "Hot Sexy Dancing Mamas (as pictured) Make You Laugh and Think and Maybe Even Giggle at Fart Jokes!!1[sic]!" But that title is too long, even if it sums up the show better.
The point is, these ladies (aka $$The Money Kids$$) put on a damn fine show. Check it out, and you will most certainly enjoy it.
...AND IF NOT, FUCK YOU (they told us to say that, too).
How did these two wacky girls come together for this project? Lauren gave us a little background: "Candy and I met on the Playground team, The MISSfits. We decided to pair up and start the Money Kids in November of 2006, and we performed at Grafitti at the Playground a lot, as well as at the Spot, and we had a great one-off at iO in June. Our main goal is to make tons of people laugh -- in the future we'd love to travel to sketchfests and hopefully just keep progressing forward. We've had a steady rise in the quality of things we're doing -- from random Spot shows to now our own run at the Skybox -- so we don't want to take any steps backwards."
Real Quotes from Real People:
"You girls are too much!" -Lauren's mom
"Will you two go out with me?" -Justin J.
"You girls areset to take over the city...You are very wiggly." - Famous Stand up Comedian, Robert Buscemi
"You girls are f***** retarded." -Dude at our show
"You guys are funny. I was all like "LOL!" the entire time..." -Julian L.
"You ladies were so F#%#ing funny! My cheeks hurt from laughing so much. You both are really good at playing little children and making Leukemia seem funny! Can't wait to see the show again!" -Jessica C.
"You two make me happy when I watch you." -Nick H.
"The MK$ are the most! Your brand of sophisticated, foreign policy-centric humor gives me a serious case of the yukyuks." -Pat T.
"I'm a fan." -John A.
"You bitches is funny!" -Jerry M.
"You guys make me pee myself!I always love seeing you do your thing, it's a treat." -Cathy
"You girls are super funny!" -Sean R.
"You guys made me laugh so much I peed my pants." -Alexis
"You guys rock! Thanks for making me laugh so hard." -Lindsay W.
"We LOVED playing with you guys! We certainly hope to do so again. A highlight was the two kids (one in helmet, the other in a hoody). They way that hoody kid talked with his tongue... was genius. Oh My Gahhh!! Great to meet you!!" -sketch group, Radio Vault
