Cancel Your Plans for Tonight.

Go on. Get your phone. Tell your mom you can’t come over for dinner, cancel your Bible study group, and tell your sweetheart they’ll have to have a ménage à moi tonight. You have new plans for Saturday night, and here they are:

You are going to see shadow puppets tonight.*

“What?” you just said. I heard you. I’ll play along with you, even.

You are going to see shadow puppets tonight.

You see, the newest installment of the seriously-I-cannot-overstate-how-delightful-it-is Sgt. Rigsby series at the Theatre Off Jackson is closing tonight. Ignore what it says on the site and go with Brown Paper Tickets – tonight is the last night it is playing and you need to go see this.

Look, I even took a surreptitious picture of the set for you. Just look.

The set of Sgt. Rigsby at the Theatre Off JacksonOk, that doesn’t tell you much except that it’s neat. But you’ve got four voice actors on your right, voicing a cast of dozens and providing sound effects. You’ve got a pair of musicians on the left, providing mood music and the musical numbers liberally studded through this thing, and you have the salacious, wonderful story of Chicken Jenny, scrappy chanteuse and gal who simply cannot escape her own bad luck. And happens to be a chicken. There’s a rentboy lamb, multiple poisonings, topless mermaids, double- and triple-crossing, dreams come true, fallen priests, and more noir-style similes than I can even begin to recount here at this late hour.

Just go. Get a friend you like and trust, grab yourself a banana beer or lime rickey at the bar, and just go. And then wait eagerly with the rest of us for the next installment.

If you must, there are some snippets on YouTube. It’s late, so I haven’t vetted them, but the first several are relevant.

Make it a full night and take your friend to Harbor City around the corner first. You can order baskets of dim sum dumplings before waddling, full to the top, over to take in culture.

Go. Go! What else were you going to do, hand-wash your dainties and catch up on your Tivo? Get out of the house! Go see this thing! Laugh your ass off and thank me later.

*Assuming you are within reasonable distance of Seattle. Which, in this case, is up to a three-hour drive.