30 Rock & SNL Live

Here's a review complete with pictures of the 30 Rock live performance at the UCB Theatre last week.

"Even though the cast read from scripts, using only chairs for props, the show was enormous, intimate and undeniable. But it’s easy to define a small, crowded space as ‘intimate’ when you’re crammed in there like I was, cross-legged on the edge of the stage floor like a wide-eyed, open-mouthed kindergartner, stuffed scalp-to nostril between the show’s script coordinator and the Teamster in charge of transportation."

Here's another review, this time from the Huffington Post.

McBrayer and Lutz provided the "commercial" breaks in the form of improvised commercials based on shouted-out suggestions from the audience. The first one was "beer" (McBrayer, as child fishing: "Fishing makes me think of mortality." Lutz urging him to have a beer: "It makes me forget about your mom." McBrayer: "I guess this beer is pretty wonderful." Lutz: "It's beer!" Fin.)

Here's their review of the Saturday Night Live show at the UCB too.

"So, if you want to understand why virtually the entire cast and crew of SNL would put on a full-length live show in this modest little spot, working their asses off as much as they ever would in Studio 8H, that's why — which is precisely what they did last night. The show, which ran almost 2 hours — with no commercial breaks, obviously — was a benefit for the SNL crew members who were laid off because of the writer's strike (the SRO crowd paid $20 apiece to get in). As Poehler said at the show's open: "No one likes laying people off, no one likes getting laid off, but everyone likes getting laid." Poehler, who used the word "family" to describe her colleagues at SNL, also made a point of including NBC in that family, thanking the network "for allowing us to do this" (the show was made up of a mixture of old and new material, with unaired sketches and jokes that Poehler assured the crowd "were never going to make it on the air" — but still presumably belonged to NBC as work-for-hire material)."