ROOFTOP COMEDY AND THE WHEELER |
29 April 2008: The Wheeler Opera House today announced the final line-up of participating stand-up comics for its new comedy festival for Aspen, in partnership with RooftopComedy. The inaugural festival will take place over two days with six public events, on Friday and Saturday, May 30 and 31.
“Rooftop and the Wheeler culled through the entire roster of comics associated with Rooftop’s website,” said Wheeler Executive Director Gram Slaton, “and came up with just over thirty that we thought could really shine in this first festival. Next came figuring out the arrangement of shows, and then which comics for which shows. It’s always a lot of work, but it’s also a labor of love for both parties. And everyone who’s coming really wants an Aspen shot, which means they’ll all be at the very top of their game.” RooftopComedy estimates about 2,500 stand-up comics have material posted through its website.
Individual stand-up sets will vary between ten and about twenty-two minutes, depending on the comic. “As in any festival situation, there’s always the chance that not all of the talent is going to appeal to every patron, but the good news is that you only have to wait a few minutes and a completely different new face will be onstage for you. But we really think we have the possibility of a festival that scores high with every player,” said Slaton.
The final roster of events for the Rooftop Comedy Festival with their participants includes:
- ROOFTOP’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST #1 (Friday, 6:45pm) will feature new faces Dave Waite, Lisa Landry, Paul Varghese, Mike E. Winfield, Kevin Camia, and Geoff Tate in this kick-off event.
- ROOFTOP AT LARGE (Friday, 8:30pm) features extended sets by fast-rising stars Chris Porter, Vince Morris, and Robert Hawkins.
- ROOFTOP AFTER DARK (Friday, 10:15pm) Tyrone Hawkins, Andi Smith, Isaac Witty, Steve Wilson, and Auggie Smith, are the comics that will be taking the material into a more adults-only direction, with hysterical results.
- THE ROOFTOP NATIONAL CAMPUS COMEDY COMPETITION FINALS (Saturday, 6:45pm) will feature four comics awarded finalist slots through online voting at Rooftop’s website, as well as four short films also chosen as viewer favorites.
- ROOFTOP’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST #2 (Saturday, 8:30pm), with John Ramsey, Matt Braunger, Erin Foley, Robert Buscemi, Nathan Trenholm, and Lamar Williams representing a second helping of Rooftop’s cream of the crop.
- THE BIG SHOW (Saturday, 10:15pm) features Tig Nataro, Mike Lukas, and Jimmy Dore – three fast-rising comedians that have been featured on Comedy Central, VH-1, MTV, and other top broadcast media.
Select comics will have clip links featured at the individual show descriptions on the Wheeler Opera House website (www.wheeleroperahouse.com), but comedy fans can find a full variety of sample clips for each comedian at RooftopComedy.com.
Four of the shows will have Emcee duties taken care of by members of Aspen’s thriving stand-up comedy community. Alexa Fitzgerald, Beth Brandon, and Todd Hartley have been selected to fill these slots. “Alexa, Beth, and Todd have all performed on the Wheeler stage, so they were a perfect fit for the festival. Each will get a mini-set, and of course perform as host for the show’s run of comics,” said Slaton. “It’s part of our commitment to establishing this new festival as being as much for locals as it is for the comics and the entertainment industry.”
A limited number of “Independence Pass” lanyards, which will provide first-seating access to all six shows, will be sold for $65.00 each, with a special discounted price of $55.00 each for inclusion in room packages and as stand-alone purchases for Roaring Fork Valley residents. The Wheeler has teamed up with Stay Aspen Snowmass and the Aspen Chamber Resort Association to promote special rooms-and-passes packages for out-of-town patrons that will be available directly from the Aspen Groups division of the Aspen Chamber Resort Association, at 800-673-5043, or via the web at rooftop.bookaspensnowmass.com. Locals wishing to take advantage of the Independence Pass discount will need to purchase in person at the Wheeler’s Aspen Show Tickets box office, with proof of local residence. “Independence Pass” lanyards will go on sale at 10am on Monday, May 5th.
Tickets for individual shows will be put on sale during the week of the festival, as available, and will be priced between $15 and $30, depending on the particular show.
The Wheeler Opera House is Aspen’s oldest and best-loved year-round performance venue, and was the setting for many of the centerpiece events for the HBO/U.S. Comedy Arts Festival over its nearly two decades of existence, including shows by and tributes to such names as Monty Python, The Simpsons Live, Don Rickles, George Carlin, Goldie Hawn, Dave Chappelle, Lewis Black, Kathy Griffin, and literally hundreds more. Its 503-seat venue is considered one of the very best showcases for stand-up comedy in the nation.
RooftopComedy records, produces and distributes live comedy performances from over twenty of the best comedy venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia, bringing the freshest new comedic voices to comedy fans around the world. In addition to live, interactive viewing opportunities via RooftopComedy.com, comedy fans across the globe will be able to watch highlights of Aspen and the Aspen festival on their mobile phones, and online via such outlets as YouTube and Facebook. Rooftop’s rapidly growing online and broadcast audience currently reaches over two million comedy viewers per month.
For more information, please call Wheeler Opera House Executive Director Gram Slaton at 920-5790, or email at grams@ci.aspen.co.us.
A NEW ANNUAL EVENT COMES TO ASPEN WITH THE ROOFTOP COMEDY FESTIVAL |
Tuesday, 22 April 2008: The Wheeler Opera House today announced that it has confirmed the creation of a new comedy festival for Aspen, in partnership with RooftopComedy, a web-based publisher of stand-up comedy performances and short-film comic content. The inaugural festival will take place over two days with six public events, on Friday and Saturday, May 30 and 31.
“The creation of this festival with Rooftop was a natural outgrowth of the Wheeler’s increasing profile as an incubator for new stand-up comedy,” said Wheeler Executive Director Gram Slaton. “Rooftop was very much a part of the four-part series the Wheeler produced with comic legend David Brenner this winter, and we actually started talking about creating our own comedy festival long before that – last summer in fact, when Aspen was still coming to terms with losing the HBO/U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. With both Rooftop and David, our direction has been not only to construct something that had a strong local appeal and presence, but also to advance the craft of stand-up comedy. The series with David was an excellent start and a brilliant model in its own right. The festival with Rooftop gives us a chance to really stretch ourselves and bring an entire developing comedy community – including a developing international community – to Aspen for a brief but very intensive (and intense!) experience.”
The festival was targeted for the end of May to coordinate with the opening of the summer tourist season. “We had hoped to lock this in with the openings of Independence Pass and Maroon Bells, two of our area’s most spectacular natural attractions, but with the record snowfall amounts this year, having the festival scheduled one week later – after Memorial Weekend – is probably a huge positive for 2008. We really want to attract lots of our friends from the Front Range who know how well Aspen does comedy and make sure they can get over the Pass.” The Rooftop Comedy Festival in effect may become the lead event in a series of pre-summer-season attractions, including Snowmass’ Chili & Brew Festival and Food & Wine Magazine’s Aspen Classic, which take place in the weekends leading up to the official start of summer signaled by the opening of the Aspen Music Festival, Theatre Aspen’s season, and the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s “Summer Words” festival. “We really like the idea of kicking off the warm months with comedy,” said Slaton. “It’s the only component to a great summer season that we’ve been missing.”
The six live events for the Rooftop Comedy Festival will include the following:
* The festival kicks off Friday with ROOFTOP AT LARGE, featuring three nationally-recognized names in New Comedy today, who have been featured on Comedy Central, VH-1, MTV, and other significant broadcast comedy outlets as well as regular national tours.
* Also on Friday, six new, relatively unknowns who are taking comedy into brilliant new territory are featured in ROOFTOP’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST. These six new faces represent some of the finest comics from Rooftop’s base of over 2,500 comedians.
* Friday closes out with a late show called ROOFTOP AFTER DARK, where five more comics take the material into a more adults-only direction, with hysterical results.
* Saturday starts with THE ROOFTOP NATIONAL CAMPUS COMEDY COMPETITION FINALS (details on this below).
* Saturday also features the second round of ROOFTOP’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST, with six more new faces representing Rooftop’s cream of the crop.
* The festival concludes with THE BIG SHOW, debuting three nationally-known performers and closing the festival on a high note.
The centerpiece of this year’s festival will be Saturday’s ROOFTOP NATIONAL CAMPUS COMEDY COMPETITION FINALS. The competition is a nationwide search for the country’s funniest college students that has played to sold-out shows houses at 32 universities and 16 semi-final contests throughout the winter. The four stand-up comedy finalists will go head to head at the Wheeler to claim the crown of funniest campus comedian during a show that will be broadcast live to thousands of viewers worldwide through Rooftop’s website. The finals promise to provide additional publicity for the Aspen festival; to date, the college competition has been covered by nationwide news outlets, including a half-page story in USA TODAY in March.
As an added attraction, the live shows are expected to include a variety of short comedic films which are also quickly becoming a staple of Rooftop’s website offerings, featuring the best clips from not only the United States but also from the United Kingdom and Australia. Other events expected for the festival include The Rooftop Awards Show, and even possibly a Rooftop Poker Invitational.
Tickets for individual shows will be priced as low as $15.00. A limited number of “Independence Pass” lanyards, which will provide first-seating access to all six shows will be sold for $65.00 each, with a special discounted price of $55.00 each for inclusion in room packages and as stand-alone purchases for Roaring Fork Valley residents. The Wheeler has teamed up with Stay Aspen Snowmass and the Aspen Chamber Resort Association to promote special rooms-and-passes packages for out-of-town patrons that will be available directly from the Aspen Groups division of the Aspen Chamber Resort Association, at 800-673-5043, or via the web at rooftop.bookaspensnowmass.com.
Locals wishing to take advantage of the Independence Pass discount will need to purchase in person at the Wheeler’s Aspen Show Tickets box office, with proof of local residence. The local inventory of “Independence Pass” lanyards will go on sale at 10am on Monday, May 5th. Tickets for individual shows will be put on sale during the week of the festival, as available.
The Wheeler Opera House is Aspen’s oldest and best-loved year-round performance venue, and was the setting for many of the centerpiece events for the HBO/U.S. Comedy Arts Festival over its nearly two decades of existence, including shows by and tributes to such names as Monty Python, The Simpsons Live, Don Rickles, George Carlin, Goldie Hawn, Dave Chappelle, Lewis Black, Kathy Griffin, and literally hundreds more. Its 503-seat venue is considered one of the very best showcases for stand-up comedy in the nation.
RooftopComedy (www.rooftopcomedy.com) records, produces and distributes live comedy performances from over twenty of the best comedy venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia, bringing the freshest new comedic voices to comedy fans around the world. In addition to live, interactive viewing opportunities via RooftopComedy.com, comedy fans across the globe will be able to watch highlights of Aspen and the Aspen festival on their mobile phones, and online via such outlets as YouTube and Facebook. Rooftop’s rapidly growing online and broadcast audience currently reaches over two million comedy viewers per month.
For more information, please call Wheeler Opera House Executive Director Gram Slaton at 920-5790, or email at grams@ci.aspen.co.us.
IS NOW ASPEN SHOW TICKETS
The Wheeler Opera House today announced that it is renaming its box office operation, in order to better reflect its emergence as chief supplier of box office ticketing services for shows and events all across the Roaring Fork Valley.
“One of our potential user groups brought to our attention that we now sell as many tickets for events happening elsewhere around Aspen and all the way to Carbondale, and that maybe we should consider taking the ‘Wheeler’ out of our box office name to reflect that,” said Wheeler Executive Director Gram Slaton. “I have to admit that it took us aback at first, but it’s true. Our new name will be more embracing of the total universe of clients we serve – and have yet to attract.”
The new name for the Wheeler’s box office will be Aspen Show Tickets, and will also feature a new ticketing website, www.aspenshowtickets.com, that will be wholly separate from the Wheeler’s website. “Patrons who go to our site for information about shows at the Wheeler will still be able to buy through our site,” said Slaton, “and they’ll also be able to purchase Wheeler tickets through the Aspen Show Tickets site. Tickets for events at other venues will be available for purchase through Aspen Show Tickets only. We’ll keep a patch on the Wheeler site for a time, as everyone works through the transition period, but the idea is that guests coming to Aspen throughout the year and looking to see what might be going on during their stay can more easily browse the web and find out all the great entertainment we have going on, twelve months of the year.”
The shift to Aspen Show Tickets is only one of a handful of changes that have come to the Wheeler box office in the past two years. Perhaps the most noteworthy for Wheeler customers has been a new, custom-designed ticketing software that was added a year ago, making web purchasing far more user-friendly. “Technology is bringing sweeping changes to how ticketing is being done now,” said Slaton, “and our software can easily integrate these changes for our Aspen and Roaring Fork Valley audiences. We hope to roll out more services throughout the coming year for even greater customer satisfaction.”
For more information, please call Wheeler Opera House Programs Manager Heather Larson at 920-5775, or email at heatherl@ci.aspen.co.us.