FRIGID Nightcap Will Bring SLOPOCALYPSE NOW Variety Show to Under St. Marks
Host Edward Gibbons-Brown leads a night of drag, clown, and burlesque tackling AI culture at the East Village venue.
FRIGID Nightcap will return to Under St. Marks on Friday, May 29 at 10:30pm with SLOPOCALYPSE NOW - A Human-Made Variety Show, a late-night variety event taking aim at AI-generated culture, dead internet aesthetics, right-wing spectacle, religious extremism, and the increasingly surreal experience of being alive online.
Hosted and produced by Edward Gibbons-Brown, FRIGID Nightcap is a monthly variety show that brings together comedy, drag, burlesque, music, clown, theater, performance art, games, surprises, and audience interaction in a true variety format. Each edition is built around a different theme, inviting artists across disciplines to respond with original, unexpected, and often unclassifiable work.
This month's theme, SLOPOCALYPSE NOW, frames the show as a live, local, human-made response to a culture increasingly overrun by "slop": AI-generated content, algorithmic sameness, fake grandeur, culture-war moral panic, gold-plated authoritarian aesthetics, and the flattening of art into something marketable, obedient, and dead behind the eyes.
"In a world full of AI slop, political slop, culture-war slop, and fake populist spectacle, the most radical thing we can do is put live humans in a room and let them make something messy, strange, and unrepeatable," said producer and host Edward Gibbons-Brown. "This show is about resisting the machine with bodies, jokes, music, drag, clowning, and actual shared presence."
The lineup will feature Glenn Blurton, presenting a new clowning performance devised specifically for the theme. The act filters AI, masculinity, incompetence, control, and the blurred line between human and inhuman through the funhouse mirror of Glenn, incorporating old landline parts, curly telephone cords, Rolodexes, audience interaction, and a possibly dysfunctional machine that may or may not successfully read minds.
Also featured will be Margo Polo, joined by Rouxl and Lucy, in a drag/burlesque performance about growing up closeted and Catholic, religious trauma, queer desire, right-wing Christian nationalism, and the liberating power of making it all extremely gay. With Margo Polo as a priest and Rouxl and Lucy appearing as shoulder-devil and shoulder-angel figures, the performance turns guilt, shame, repression, and moral panic into campy, erotic, unapologetic queer spectacle.
Britt will perform their original song "Dead Internet Theory" live, accompanied by dance and a video backdrop exploring tech billionaires, AI, and the haunted feeling of being online. Described in the submission as an artist angry at the ubiquity of AI taking revenge "the only way they know how-ART," the act speaks directly to the show's central question: what survives when culture starts to feel generated instead of lived?
Returning Nightcap favorites The Strange Girlzz will also appear, bringing their signature blend of femme weirdness, theatrical mischief, movement, and live performance chaos to the Slopocalypse. In a show about resisting cultural flattening, The Strange Girlzz offer the kind of strange, embodied, irreducible performance that cannot be optimized for the feed.
The evening will also include Nightcap OpenStage, the show's recurring wildcard performance slot, which gives an artist space for a short, anything-can-happen appearance. For SLOPOCALYPSE NOW, OpenStage functions as part of the theme itself: a space for live, local, unpredictable performance in a culture increasingly allergic to surprise.
"Nightcap has always been about putting artists from different worlds in the same room and seeing what sparks," Gibbons-Brown added. "This month, that mission feels especially urgent. The more the culture gets automated, sanitized, and flattened, the more important it becomes to gather in a basement and watch something happen that is actually alive."
FRIGID Nightcap: SLOPOCALYPSE NOW - A Human-Made Variety Show will play Friday, May 29 at 10:30pm at Under St. Marks, located at 94 St. Marks Place in New York City.
Videos
|
Broadway Magic Hour Broadway Comedy Club (1/01-6/30) |
|
Really Really 122CC 2nd Floor Theater (5/14-5/17) |
|
THE IPHIGENIAMACHINE The Beckmann, American Theatre of Actors (5/12-5/17) |
|
James & The Giant Peach Stage Left Children's Theatre (5/07-5/16) |
|
Kids 'N Comedy's 30th Anniversary Showcase Gotham Comedy Club (5/17-5/17) |
|
Rock Never Dies Hard Rock Cafe (5/29-8/30) |
|
An American Voice - LIVE The Green Room 42 (5/15-5/15) |
|
"Present Laughter" by Noel Coward Stag & Lion Theatre (5/14-5/24) |
|
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Ajkun Ballet Theatre (4/11-8/14) |
|
Open Stay WNY Premier Taylor Theatre at the Kenan Center (5/29-5/30) |
| VIEW ALL SHOWS ADD A SHOW | |
