Flying Cat Circus - Freakshow video
Every so often we happen upon an act in the campus market that is unlike any other. The Flying Cat Circus is one of those shows. It can best be described as comedy with some magic and juggling sprinkled on top. The driving force behind the act is Kevin Lepine and Thom Britton.Kevin Lepine skillfully swallows a string of double-edged razors. Kevin, a native of Detroit, Michigan is an accomplished magician and illusionist who has been performing for about ten years. He started performing in a number of theatrical productions where he had the opportunity to meet various magicians. "Ever since then, I just fell in love with the art. I developed a great love for the art of magic and performing comedy."Thom, who claims he was sold into slavery at the age of eight and had to be funny to survive, grew up on Johnny Carson, George Carlin, Sam Kinnison and the like. "It's the standard 'comedy is a gateway drug that leads to performing,' so I started doing anything I could that was entertaining. I got into the circus sideshow style genre; things like sword swallowing, fire eating and glass walking. The stuff from the 1930's really caught my attention. Now I focus on a Vaudeville style of performing, but back then I was really interested in the freak show side of things. Then, as I got older I started to get into more of the Vaudeville acts like the Chinese Circus and the Russian Circus. Now, in just the last five or six years, I have started putting the stand-up comedy routines into what I do." A chainsaw-wielding Thom Britton autographs an apple for a fan.Kevin met his partner Thom (originally from The Big Easy), while serving out a contract on a six-month theatre run in New Orleans. Thom had just come off of a tour with a group called The Modern Gypsies when the two met. "We just started talking and jokingly discussed a show that we could put together that would be totally different from the stereotypical shows and all the common stuff you see nowadays. As my theatre contract started to come up, Thom started to get the urge to go back out on the road again, and the idea became less and less of a joke. So we wrote out our ideas and got a concrete feeling for what we wanted to do, went out on a quick two week tour, realized it got the response we wanted and we had a lot of fun doing it. So The Flying Cat Circus was born."