Duluth, exaggerated for the stage, with songs.
Take It With You turns Duluth, Minnesota into a tall tale about itself: Lake Superior hurls a 700-foot wave at downtown, a hero named Captain Sea Captain throws himself parades, and a record store packs up after a plan that was supposedly air-tight. The comedy is staged live, and the songs between scenes play it straight.
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Take It With You is comic theatre from Duluth, Minnesota, performed live on stage and released as audio. The Season 6 finale, 'Season 6 – Chapter 8: Opera Night', comes with a promise that it is uncut, exactly what happened on stage, like a pan of brownies nobody bothered to slice into squares. That image fits the whole enterprise. Each season is its own world, and the city is rarely far from the joke. Season 8 lives in a building that has been a bar, a baseball stadium, a folk school and a record store called Troubadour Records. Now, in the show's own words, it is just a building full of friends and dreams. The record store does not survive a plan that was, by all accounts, air-tight, and an episode title names the damage: 'SEASON 8 - EPISODE 2: THE RAFFI FIASCO'. The regulars include Katie, Zach, Blake, Matt and Rick, and the supporting cast is generous. Vinnie and Rocco are customers with a wool business that is supposedly legitimate and a smell nobody wants to bring up. Zach has a new album and a contract to push Orange Julius, and the people around him care about only one of those. The season's disaster, a 700-foot wave off Lake Superior, is recounted by Mary Wolfe on a news program called Duluth Digest. Its hero, Captain Sea Captain, wants it understood that he is not that kind of captain. His manager and PR whiz, Stella, arrives with her mother, Roberta. Even the holidays get a gag: in December the yellow traffic lights are disabled in honor of Christmas, accidents and all. Season 6 swaps the lakeshore for a frontier town. It has a marshal, a gold shipment leaving by stagecoach, and a mining operation striking it rich in Smashmouth Valley. A traveling circus is headed that way because, as the narrator notes, even artists need to make a buck. The same narrator stops to wonder whether a flamingo bought with mining money means as much as one seen flying in the wild, and settles on no. Songs are woven into the scenes, and they play it straight. One is about the excuses and lies people tell themselves. Another builds on the line about feeling safe with someone, while the characters around it wonder whether rain is just tears. Even the sponsor thanks are written as material, with a brewery pitched as a way to sip the Aurora Borealis from a can. The credits name Nick Gosen and Blake Thomas as the podcast's mixers and editors and Sarah Luke as the logo designer, with support from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, The North 103.3 and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. For present-day Duluth nonsense, start with Season 8. For the western, go to Season 6.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys scripted ensemble comedy rooted in one real place, and who is happy to have a sincere song interrupt a bit about sheep.
What sets it apart: It is staged live and built out of Duluth itself: Lake Superior, December snow and even the sponsor thanks all feed the jokes. Songs share the stage with the scenes and are sung earnestly, not played for laughs.
Live Radio Theatre From Duluth, MN
A U.S. marshal meets an impossible family tree, and you're expected to keep a straight face.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A snowy Duluth gathering turns writer's block into a public Orange Julius problem.
Christmas in Duluth comes in with snow, dressed-up storefronts, and a local tradition that turns off every yellow traffic light, pushing drivers straight from green to red.
A bakery shift gets tangled in sheep clippers, cake orders, and customers with unexpected cash.
Take It With You turns a bakery shift into a lightly chaotic workplace comedy, with sheep clippers, cake orders, and customers whose wool business keeps raising eyebrows.
Duluth's 700-foot-wave disaster turns into a cape, a parade, and a hero brand built on shaky confidence.
Mary Wolfe opens on the Soupnami, a 700-foot wave that ravaged Duluth's lakeshore, leveled buildings, and nearly erased downtown without taking a life.
A gold shipment, a badge handoff, and original songs make this live comic western a fondly chaotic finale.
Opera Night turns a live stage performance into a loose comic western, with a gold shipment and one last heist pressing Marshal Zatch toward a choice between duty and the people he loves.
A loose live Western farce where a traveling circus follows mining money into stranger and stranger trouble.
The Homestead sends a traveling circus toward Smashmouth Valley, where a booming mining operation has artists looking for cash and a place to rest.
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
Take It With You's Season 8 - Episode 4, "Mitchell P.
Take It With You's 'The Raffi Fiasco' centers on Troubadour Records in Duluth, where Blake and Matt discover that Raffi already runs Troubadour Music Incorporated.
["Take It With You centers Duluth Digest on the Soupnami, a 700-foot Lake Superior wave that leveled buildings in Duluth.", "Mary Wolfe interviews Captain Sea Captain, who calls himself a superhero, says he swims 'real good,' and claims he skipped a rock across the St.
["Take It With You Season 6, Chapter 7, 'The Homestead,' is a live October 15, 2019 performance at Teatro Zaccone in Duluth, Minnesota that turns a western trail story into a debate about dreams, birds, and what counts as real.", "Mary, Zatch, Rick Dad, Billy that kid, and Gunshot move through pre-dawn reflections, a flamingo sighting, and a premonition about capybaras, praying mantises, and Smashmouth Valley on fire.", "The middle of the episode mixes Cal Halloway's gold mine, a murder trench, Penny and Jules's bank-robbing love story, and a Crusty Ranch barn siege with wolves, coyotes, and ultra-intelligent mountain lions.", "The closing stretch returns the troupe to a changed Smashmouth Valley, where the song insists it is 'good to be home' while also admitting 'this ain't fuckin' home.'"]
A live, uncut Take It With You finale recorded on November 19, 2019 at Teatro Zicone in Duluth, Minnesota, turns a western town return into a gold-heist setup built around ham.
Take It With You: Season 6 – Chapter 4: Steamboat Snatch was recorded live on July 16, 2019, at Teatro Zocconi in Duluth, Minnesota.
Take It With You: Season 6 – Chapter 6: Rumor Mill is a live Western satire recorded September 17, 2019, at Teatro Zocconi in Duluth, Minnesota.
Take It With You: Season 6 – Chapter 3: Big Rain is a live Teatro Zucconi comedy about U.S.
Take It With You Season 6, Chapter 2, “Traveling Circus,” follows U.S.
Take It With You's Episode #40, "Emergency Broadcast – The Musical," follows Jane Goodmostly and fellow primate-lab workers through an experiment intended to eliminate monkey boredom.
Take It With You: Season 6 – Chapter 1: Hired Gun is a live western-comedy story recorded at Teatro Zucconi in Duluth, Minnesota, on April 16, 2019.
Take It With You's Episode #39 follows four unsupervised seniors who revisit a 40-year-old zoo massacre involving one wolf, seven cockatoos, 12 monkeys, and 52 penguins.
Take It With You’s Episode #38, recorded live on September 18 at North Shore Theater, continues the Capyard–McCarch feud over a lemon tree whose ownership depends on an original plat map and a changing river.
Take It With You’s “The Ballad of Mitchell P.
Take It With You episode 36 places the O'Connell family in Boston-style boxing satire, where Petey Pete Rock O'Connell repeatedly fights larger opponents to cover Tommy's escalating bail.
Take It With You episode 35 follows Mary, Buffy, and Sharon on a Tesla road trip from Duluth toward the South, joined unexpectedly by their former softball teammate Rhonda and Australian hitchhiker Trig.
Take It With You's fourth annual Halloween episode sends Blake Thomas, Mary, Andy, Rick, and Zach on a staff retreat to West Duluth, where a flat tire leads to warnings about disappearances.
Take It With You’s “Knights and Castles and Shit: A Period Piece” parodies a fantasy history in which Hydratius’s affair with Plagoronica fractures one world into four kingdoms.
Take It With You’s “Thanksgiving: The Musical” follows a Puritan settlement preparing a harvest feast while Jedediah, Boris, and Gideon hunt a turkey.
Take It With You Episode #30, "The Empire Smacks Zach," presents a live sci-fi comedy about Andy Fry using a musical cloning device to reshape Earth into a population of Andy clones.
Take It With You's Episode #33 presents A Super General Hospital, a serialized stage parody set in the seaside town of Michael Bay, where Charlie Cordova and Lily Fontaine profit from injuries and food poisoning.
Take It With You's "Behind The Scenes" uses interviews and reenactments to present a fictional history of Blake Thomas, Lorenzo Pancetta, and the Duluth live radio podcast.
Take It With You episode 28 is a live Duluth radio play about the 1955 World Beer Tournament and Ivan Drago's multigenerational attempt to avenge a lost title.
Take It With You episode 27, "A Day to Remember and Forget and Remember Again," revisits October 9, 2000, when Duluth teenagers face a homecoming football game, a toga party, a band rehearsal, and a mathematics test.
Take It With You episode 26, “Wedding Of The Century,” is a live Duluth radio play about a chaotic wedding involving Steve, Jamie, wedding planner Ross Mellor, and maid of honor Rachel.
Take It With You's "It's The Apocalypse" ranks 24 zombie-survival answers from 23 previous guests, using only the skills stated in their interviews.
Brooks Thomas and Matt Gildner discuss gravity, including why scientists have not detected a graviton even after LIGO detected ripples in space-time.
Take It With You’s “The Golden Guitar” opens season four with a scripted Smashmouth Valley story about Roddy McCoy inheriting an instrument said to be worth more than the town twenty times over.
Take It With You Episode 17, “Carpe Diem,” is a live radio-theater comedy from Duluth, Minnesota, built around a note predicting the world will end at 11:59 p.m.
Take It With You stages a Thanksgiving gathering in Duluth, Minnesota, where Mayor Don Ness stresses over a dinner that eventually lacks a turkey and contains improvised fake side dishes.
A live radio theatre Halloween episode with a scripted story, audience suggestions, and promotional messages.
A live radio theater show from Duluth, MN, featuring a fictional letter to President-elect Trump and celebrating Leonard Cohen's music.
Take It With You's season two finale combines live radio theater with a Duluth story about Cherry's bar, a missing mayor, and Don Ness's final appearance before leaving office.
Take It With You’s “Episode #21: Dark And Stormy” follows Blake Thomas and a pirate crew searching for three magical cocktail ingredients across the Isles of Citrus, Zingiber, and Ethel.
Take It With You's Episode #07: Allhallowtidings follows Blake through a Halloween night at the Take It With You Tavern, where Countless Penny supposedly return 100 years after vanishing in a horse-and-buggy accident.
A live radio theatre episode featuring a Halloween murder mystery set in a bar, with a game of drink-making and a threatening caller.
Take It With You’s “Episode #11: The Festival” follows Blake Thomas and his tavern crew as they bring an unidentified basement beer to a Duluth beer festival.