Review: Laughs Find a Way: "Hold on to Your Butts" is Comic Craft for All

Hold on to Your Butts

Created by Recent Cutbacks

Directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker

Performed by Nick Abeel, Kerry Ipema, and Natalie Rich (cast performing in rotation)

Foley by Blair Busbee and Kelly Robinson

Presented at SoHo Playhouse as part of the International Fringe Encore Series

15 Vandam Street, Manhattan, NYC

February 7–March 15, 2026

Natalie Rich and Nick Abeel. Photo by JT Anderson.

Few contemporary films (or film franchises) are as synonymous with spectacle as 1993’s Jurassic Park, the legacy of which (perhaps ironically) rests on the promise that maximum technology, budget, and scale are how we fill cinemas, VOD streaming queues, and a couple of strategically-located theme parks. This is how we entertain the masses. Hold on to Your Butts, now playing at SoHo Playhouse, takes that premise and promise seriously, only to invert it. What emerges is not a simple skewering of bloated budget blockbuster culture, but something warmer and more revealing, a reminder that awe can be rebuilt from bodies, breath, shared memory, and perhaps a well-placed traffic cone.

Performed on the day I attended by Nick Abeel and Nathalie Rich, with live Foley by Blair Busbee, the show reenacts the film shot for shot using cardboard cutouts, wooden frames, flashlights, miniatures, and a bracing economy of means. As one enters the theatre, John Williams’s iconic score floods the entry and spills into the barroom below, epic sound filling a space better built for intimacy than grandeur. The mismatch is funny, and everyone is wearing a smile this afternoon, but it also does conceptual work. Spectacle, the production insists, does not belong exclusively to scale.

Natalie Rich and Nick Abeel. Photo by JT Anderson.

Throughout the performance, the comedy is driven by audience anticipation and recognition, as well as by deft direction. A Hawaiian shirt announces Dennis Nedry before his name is spoken, an umbrella becomes the spitter dinosaur with perfect efficiency, and a single pair of glasses conjures Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm so completely that imitation gives way to inhabitation (and the audience loses it accordingly). Rich captures not just mannerism but rhythm and bravado, summoning the iconic character with almost nothing added. When Malcolm’s (now Abeel, thanks to an exchange of Malcom’s signature eyewear) “Life, uh, finds a way” arrives, the audience joins in eagerly at Abeel’s behest, a choral moment of joy that cuts across the variable demographics attending the performance.

That participation is no accident. This is a production keenly aware of who is in the room and how they arrived there. At the matinee I attended, families bundled against the cold filled the house, and the prevailing mood was one of warmth and communion. Yet the show never panders to facile forms of collective coziness. Its nostalgia is affectionate, but not unthinking. A line welcoming BD Wong “just in time for exposition” lands because it names the film’s shortcuts even as it delights in them.

Kelly Robinson. Photo by JT Anderson

Busbee’s Foley work is extraordinary, operating dramaturgically rather than decoratively. Silverware, keyboards, vocalizations, and accumulating layers of sound do not merely accompany the action but narrate it, foregrounding the labor that cinematic realism typically conceals. The whispered “Barbasol,” followed by an extravagantly overworked soundscape for the DNA transport canister, gently exposes the plot’s absurdities while reveling in their persistence (and garnering a very well-earned, full-theatre laugh). Invisible digital polish is replaced with visible, audible effort, and wonder is recalibrated accordingly.

What ultimately gives Hold on to Your Butts its emotional ballast is the relationship between performers Abeel and Rich. Their rapport radiates joy, but it is built on trust and study. They use each other’s bodies not merely for punchlines, but as load-bearing structures. At one point, they literally balance together to create a dinosaur, a moment that is physically impressive and quietly moving. These are sturdy backs in every sense, bearing weight, relying on one another, and offering a vision of spectacle grounded in cooperation rather than capital.

Nick Abeel, Natalie Rich, and Kelly Robinson. Photo by JT Anderson

The pacing, at roughly eighty minutes, keeps the beat - brisk and confident - with the inventive use of aisles and front-row seats expanding the space via mild audience interaction, without dissipating focus. The show opens with filmed mock trailers, including a sharp (and quite funny) riff on The Matrix, a savvy acknowledgment of an audience steeped in screen culture. The gesture is smart. It meets spectators where they are, then gently guides them toward the pleasures of live performance.

Stripped of its “family friendly” designation, Hold on to Your Butts reveals itself as a defense of performance itself. For eighty-odd minutes, a roomful of strangers, families, couples, and single spectators sat together laughing, not isolated by screens or siloed into individualized consumption, but gathered around a shared act of invention. The pleasure here is human: active, communal, and necessarily physical.

In remaking one of cinema’s more technologically ambitious films through bodies, props, and sound crafted in plain sight, the production does more than pay affectionate homage to that storied Isla Nublar and the many misadventures therein. It models a way of playing, and of making, in the shadow of big-budget monoliths. The spectacle does not disappear; it is redistributed. Democratized. What remains is a sense that performance, practiced with this much care, trust, and imagination, can still bring people together, and remind them that wonder does not require permission from shareholders or screens.

-Noah Simon Jampol