Experience the Impact of Live Music

The Capitol Steps began as a group of Senate staffers who set out to satirize the very people and places that employed them.

The group was born in December, 1981 when some staffers for Senator Charles Percy were planning entertainment for a Christmas party. Their first idea was to stage a nativity play, but in the whole Congress they couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin. So, they decided to dig into the headlines of the day, and they created song parodies & skits which conveyed a special brand of satirical humor.

In the years that followed, many of the Steps ignored the conventional wisdom (“Don’t quit your day job!”), and although not all of the current members of the Steps are former Capitol Hill staffers, taken together the performers have worked in a total of eighteen Congressional offices and represent 62 years of collective House and Senate staff experience.

Since they began, the Capitol Steps have recorded over 30 albums, including their latest, Orange Is the New Barack. They’ve been featured on NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS, and can be heard twice a year on National Public Radio stations nationwide during their Politics Takes a Holiday radio specials.

August 9 | 8PM | $43 Advance | $46 Day of Show

With smart, observational humor and a legendary spontaneous interaction with the crowd, Paula Poundstone is one of our country’s pre-eminent comedians. She improvises with a crowd like a Jazz musician, swinging in unexpected directions without a plan, without a net. There’s a disarming ease in her craft, an immediate sense that she’s so quick on her feet you need never worry about the possibility of something going wrong.

In 1998, when NPR’s #1 show, the weekly comedy news quiz, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! came calling, Poundstone was the perfect fit as one of the pundits on the Panel.  Nobody can remember if she was a popular regular panelist right from the start. When asked about Paula, Wait, Wait host Peter Sagal replied, “Paula Poundstone is the funniest human being I have ever known. Everything she does, thinks, or says is hilarious. If you cut her into bits, each piece would be funny. (But don’t!). Air becomes funny having been breathed by her.”