McQueen- Black Cat

Fresh off a tour with Funny or Die and creator of the new Comedy Central Snapchat series Heads Will Roll McQueen Adams has taken his world of impressions, music, and comedy in a fresh and innovative direction, creating a hi-tech audio-visual universe. His new show BLACK CAT incorporates his improvisational skills with the music of groups such as Daft Punk and Coldplay, voices both real and fictional, including Gandalf, his Mom’s Cat and Jason Statham, and plenty of original bizarre inhabitants. An album of Black Cat will drop in October of this year.

Adams is master of this mashup of songs,voices, and sketches that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has called “just brilliant.” While touring with Radiohead one fateful night in Miami, McQueen impressed the band with an impersonation so fresh an multi-media show idea was born. McQueen now presents a fusion of music, comedy and video which parodies pop stars, movies and a variety of celebrities, creating an incredibly unique new universe with every show. 

“McQueen Adams mixes music, comedy, celebrity impressions and screen projections, touching on a range of pop cultural and topical topics in his show, which sold out for two straight weeks in London. Like Weird Al Yankovic, McQueen clearly loves pop music but likes to skewer it with nerdy parodies. His anthem on behalf of redheads everywhere, “Ginger Corvette,” makes you realize why Prince was sexy in the first place while vaguely turning you on to Conan O’Brien in an uncomfortable, yet irresistible, way.” – The Portland Tribune 

““A McQueen show is similar to almost nothing, coming out of a shrinking left field to smack his spectators with a welded mass of comedic absurdity, electronica, voice-over videos and impersonations. By the time the bewilderment settles, there’s the feeling that it was either a hilarious hallucination caused by a YouTube overdose, or a smartly veiled jab at the current state of American culture washing over you. And it’s exactly that kind of fuzzy understanding of McQueen that has left audiences salivating for more.” -Charleston Post & Courier 

“A pop culture mix of music, comedy and multimedia…In both concept and execution, a McQueen performance is consistent with the ethos of sampling. He takes content from a variety of disparate sources and reprocesses it through his own sensibility, creating something new and unique, yet oddly familiar in the process.” – Ashville Mountain X-Press

Opening the evening is Portland-based comedian Connor McGrath, who hosted the No Chill Comedy program, featuring McQueen Adams, at Waking Windows last fall.

Connor McGrath has has performed across North America since 2011. Voted Maine’s Best Comedian by readers of the Portland Phoenix for the second straight year, the delightful and cuddly McGrath jokes openly about his Asperger’s syndrome, which he describes as “low-class, high-functioning autism.” He is the senior member of the Portland Comedy Co-Op, which produces comedy shows across Southern Maine. He has opened up for Jay Mohr, Cameron Esposito, and Mark Normand and performed at the Burning Bridges Comedy Festival and Rogue Island Comedy Festival. He enjoys long leisurely power walks around Deering Center and iced coffee unsweetened with coconut milk.