It’s been five long, painfully unfunny years, but the irreverent ghoul Gwarsenio Hall and the Two Minutes to Late Night crew are back with an all-new live show at the Gramercy Theater in New York City on December 14th, featuring ex-Every Time I Die guitarist and current AEW superstar Andy ‘The Butcher’ Williams, plus a super-secret mystery house band.
“This is our return to doing the talk show. And what we are hoping to do with this show is for it to be a way for us to be able to return to the talk show, but bringing it outside of St. Vitus so more people can come to see it, so we’re not dependent on having to bring the guests to us. We can go to where the guests we’ve wanted to work with are. And I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” shares Gwarsenio, the bastard love child of Conan O’Brien and a corpse-paint-clad demon in a sitdown with Decibel.
“It’s the most elaborate and crazy stage show that we have put together. We’ve been doing this for eight years and we get better at doing it and figuring out how the show can be more us each time. And this is going to be the funniest one we’ve ever done. And I think people are going to be excited about it.”
The idea of a mosh Olympics, admittedly, is fucking brilliant, with the mad hatter host breaking down the expectations for the gonzo event.
“The theme of the show is going to be the 2023 Mosh Olympics, which is going to be a lot of fun. Essentially, it’s going to be like a mosh-themed field day where people from the audience can sign up to compete in little mosh-themed events. There are not going to be actual crazy pits, but we’re isolating and propping up elements of moshing and trying to figure out who’s the best of each one, at each element. So the moshing happens on stage and it’s going to be scrutinized by a panel of esteemed judges.”
The return to the live show, which Hall hopes will become a traveling property with different guests and house bands at each performance, comes in the wake of a lengthy COVID-enforced hiatus in which the Two Minutes family adapted, producing a series of inventive, and often hilarious, cover videos.
“We got a head start, I think, accidentally on everybody because we started recording these isolated covers as a way to get people who wanted to be on the show but hadn’t found a way to make it to New York with free time to do our show,” he explains “We had three ready to go before the pandemic actually hit, and then we pivoted. Since we had already had those together, it was easy for us to focus on how to make it helpful for artists.
“I think we originally came up with the concept for doing the isolated covers as a way to have Chelsea Wolfe on the show without her actually being on the show. We had that cover demoed for her version of “Crazy Train” with the John Carpenter-style intro for five years. It was just sitting there. She mentioned she wanted to be on the show right after the pilot and she wanted to sing “Crazy Train.” And so we made that. That was the hard part about doing only at Vitus shows. It was like, ‘Hey, are you coming to town and free to come to Greenpoint?’ It was not always easy to get guests to come through. So this was like a way to make it happen.”
Tickets for the return of the Two Minutes to Late Night live show are available here.
