Q&A: KEVIN!!!!! - The Recs

Recent Cutbacks return to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer with the UK premiere of KEVIN!!!!!, an inventive live parody inspired by the classic film Home Alone. The Recs is delighted to chat to director and co-founder Kristin McCarthy Parker about adapting an iconic movie for the stage, and the joy of film parody.

Hello Kristin. Thank you for taking time to tell our readers about your new show.

Thanks!

Home Alone was the highest-grossing film of 1990. What lured you to create a stage parody inspired by it? Why was it right for the Recent Cutbacks treatment?

KEVIN is the only show we’ve done where the original is already a comedy. Parody usually thrives on self-serious material, so that was a fun challenge. We also finally got to use live projections, an idea we’d shelved during Fly, You Fools!

Puppetry is at the heart of KEVIN!!!!!. This is a new element, I think, for Recent Cutbacks. What was the inspiration behind the move for puppetry to become part of the show’s creative language?

We wanted a childlike sense of play — we’re seeing a lot of this world through Kevin’s eyes — so the puppets and miniatures are built from toys, recycled materials and household knick-knacks. It also just works better. Harry and Marv falling into traps in Act 3 is funnier with a sock puppet than a human.

The production combines puppetry, miniature sets, live projections, Foley, physical theatre and music. How did all of those different elements come together during the creative process? Is it technically challenging?

Puppetry and miniatures felt like a natural extension of a kid’s Christmas world. We’ve always done Foley, but this show leans harder into live singing too. Lotta Christmas carols and popular songs. Putting it all together is a genuine challenge. It’s our biggest show by far, with a lot of props that have to travel and get reassembled. But that excess is part of the magic. Watching the actors wrangle it live is half the fun.

How collaborative is the process within Recent Cutbacks, and how does the company develop ideas together?

Fully collaborative. The best idea in the room wins. We start with a movie and a concept we want to explore (here it’s puppets and live projections), experiment, then build. We typically rehearse for about a month before our first show. Kevin has changed the most of any show since its debut in 2016. We’ve trimmed it down and modernized the tech: iPhones instead of camcorders, a green-screen Qlab setup, etc.

Thinking about the tight running time, condensing a feature-length film into a one-hour Fringe show can’t be easy. How do you decide what stays, what goes, and what needs to be reinvented for the stage?

We build around what people actually remember. If you were describing your favorite movie to a friend, what would you mention and what would you skip? That’s usually the test.

How do you strike the balance between the fidelity of following the original film that people know and love, and parody, giving yourselves permission to put your own stamp on it?

We treat the source material with love. We’re only doing this because we (and the audience, presumably) love the film. The comedy comes from playing inside that world: the characters, the anachronisms, our live treatment of it. We also add a lot once we’re in front of an audience and can feel what’s landing.

You’ve now brought several productions to the Edinburgh with great success. What keeps drawing you back to the Fringe?

Our whole ethos, from our first show Hold On to Your Butts in 2014, is accidentally very Fringe. We wanted to do something ambitious with no budget, so we got resourceful. We always sensed we’d do well here, but didn’t make it happen until 2024. Since then it’s opened up the UK and international markets for us, and raised our profile back home. We keep coming back because it’s great for the company, and endlessly inspiring to see what like-minded artists are making.

This year, Fringe audiences can catch three Recent Cutbacks shows. What does it mean to be returning with KEVIN!!!!!, alongside Fly, You Fools! (your Lord of the Rings parody) and Hold on to Your Butts (RC’s parody of Jurassic Park)?

The shows play off each other really well. We see a lot of audiences hop from one to the next. Fools was partly a response to what we learned making Butts, and the same is true of Kevin. All three come from the same ethos but look wildly different. It’s a good window into how we’ve evolved.

What did you learn from these two previous shows, and how did it inform creating KEVIN!!!!!?

We had no context for what we were doing on Butts, just instinct and a desire to break the rules a bit. With Fools we wanted something more mature and pared-back, which forced real creativity into the staging. KEVIN took the live-projection idea we’d shelved on Fools and went full maximalism, pushing the tech-plus-puppetry combo as far as it would go.

Hold on to Your Butts has been performed Off-Broadway, in the West End, and, obviously, at the Edinburgh Fringe. Do audience reactions vary in these different locations?

They’ve all been wonderful. As we’ve grown up, our audience has too. More of them have kids now, so we see more families than we did in our 20s doing shows in NYC. Fringe crowds are game for anything; Butts was an early-afternoon show in 2024-2025, so it’ll be interesting seeing it at 20:30 this year with a rowdier crowd.

What other films are on your list for potential Recent Cutbacks parody?

A Matrix one we’ve already developed called There Is No Spoon. Face/Off as a two-hander has come up a few times, and a video game show with a ton of Foley.

For anyone discovering your work for the first time, what do you hope they’ll take away from KEVIN!!!!!?

Laughter, play, wonder. We want people leaving inspired to make something with whatever’s lying around. One parent told us the show kickstarted their kid’s imaginative play for weeks after seeing it Off-Broadway. That’s the whole point, especially now in the digital era.