'Nick Danger' Celebrates 40th Birthday with Firesign Theatre's FORWARD, INTO THE PAST

The famed comedy troupe, Fireside Theatre, will host a special "40th birthday" celebration honoring the creation of their well-known character 'Nick Danger.' Entitled FORWARD, INTO THE PAST, the celebration will consist of four performances to be held October 14 - October 17 at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood.

The troupe began as live radio performers in Los Angeles, California on radio stations KPPC-FM and KPFK during the mid-1960s. Together, they perfected a stream of consciousness style that links direct references to movies, radio, TV, political figures and other cultural sources, intermingled with sound effects and bits of music. While their stream of consciousness style has the feel of improvisational comedy, most of it actually is tightly scripted and memorized.

Between September 9, 1970 and February 17, 1971, The Firesign Theatre performed a one-hour live show on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles titled Dear Friends. These live shows were recorded by the group and then edited into slightly shorter shows which the group syndicated to radio stations across the country on 12-inch LPs. The group later collected what they thought were the best segments from the Dear Friends radio program for their fifth record, Dear Friends.

In 1972 and 1974, Straight Arrow Press, Rolling Stone's book publishing arm, published two books authored by The Firesign Theatre. These books, The Firesign Theatre's Big Book Of Plays and The Firesign Theatre's Big Mystery Joke Book, contain scholarly information, satirical introductions and parodic histories, as well as transcriptions of many of the performances from their first seven albums. 

Nick Danger is a fictional character featured in several of the albums produced by the comedy group The Firesign Theatre: How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All (1969), Nick Danger: The Case of the Missing Shoe (1979), The Three Faces of Al (1984) and The Bride of Firesign (2001). Voiced by Phil Austin, he is a film noir style "hard-boiled" detective who gets into wacky, mysterious adventures, frequently involving mistaken identity, betrayal, and femme fatales. The character also features in the Firesign-produced film Nick Danger in The Case of the Missing Yolk.

For more information, please visit www.firesigntheatre.com.

 

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