Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland”

Is a travesty and a sin.

Chicago Improv Adventure

Vero and I went to Chicago this weekend to see their improv. We’d seen Chicago teams and improvisers before (TJ & Dave, Adsit and Gausas, Improvised Shakespeare, a few more at DCM, etc.) but we wanted to find out what standard fare was in the city where (as far as we’re concerned) it all started. Being at the ImprovOlympic Theater itself was cool. It’s the theater Del and Charna founded in 1981, and it hasn’t moved since, so when you’re there you’re there, man.

We spent most of our time at iO. For three nights we saw Harold teams and “show” teams, which were thematic or just consisted of veteran performers. As usual, the bad shows were bad, the good shows were good and the great shows were amazing.

Nerd alert for the rest of this post. Also, when I call stuff out as being “weird” I mean “not what I’m used to,” not “deformed and sub-par.”

• They do form side lines! As both an audience member and a performer I prefer a back line, but if I’d started studying in Chicago I’d probably feel differently.
• Every single Harold has a pianist. We were really thrown by this, since in New York you only have a piano on stage if you’re doing full-blown musical improv. Only a few scenes (including one Harold’s third beats) ever veered into actual musical territory, though; most of the time the pianist just provided background music and added some flourishes for initiations, transitions, etc. I’d like to say that I got used to it and ended up loving it, but the truth is I couldn’t stand the distraction. I rarely felt it added anything to the scenes, and it required improvisers to speak even more loudly than what’s normally required on stage—for entire scenes! There’s also a bar in back and a waitress walking around taking orders, so the place is already loud enough to challenge the lungs of smaller or quieter performers.
• Most teams used an opening that kinda combines a standard pattern game with a Living Room and Krompf-esque mini-scenes. Usually the first initiation would be a line or attitude taken from the very last part of the opening.
• Performers seemed really comfortable with bending space. On average if someone wanted to speak to a bartender in a scene they’d do it at center stage facing the audience, and someone from the back line would reply as the bartender. In NY everyone seems to agree that you just gotta see those bartenders!
• Often second beats took plot points, locations or characters from their first beats, instead of situations, behaviors or games. Example:
  • First beat: A guy and girl are having their first date at a sushi place. From the opening line, the girl has been trying to surreptitiously scratch her crotch (crabs were mentioned in the opening). The guy behaves uncomfortably—obviously aware of what’s going on but unwilling to mention it—and the conversation continues with a very fun awkwardness in the air. The scene is edited on his casually delivered line, “So what’s up with your vagina?”
  • Second beat: Two employees of the same sushi restaurant are in the kitchen making fun of how fat and dumb Americans are.

  Unsettling to our UCB-trained minds! It didn’t happen all the time, but more than we’re used to. Is this pattern a mistaken perception based on a small sample size, or something actually different about their Harolds? Not sure! The stronger teams tended to have more direct, game-heavy second beats, though - usually time dashes, not a lot of analogous moves.

• We saw a lot more “fade edits,” I think they’re called, than sweep edits. Usually when someone wanted to initiate a scene they just went ahead and did it with no warning, and no signal other than the style and content of their dialogue. It was a little unnerving, but I kinda liked it. It usually took a second for people to figure out whether their scene partner was initiating a new scene, but all of the teams seemed comfortable with it. The edits felt smooth and confident and I don’t remember a single edit that had a false start and turned into a jokey or meta scene.
• Along the same lines: initiations were kinda languid, in a good way. Like if someone wanted to start a scene where they were driving a car, they started talking while they came off the side lines, grabbed a chair, and sat down, instead of waiting until the stage picture was complete before talking. I liked it! It kinda complimented the audience’s imagination and helped the scene get started faster at the same time. In New York I feel like that kind of initiation would be a prime target for a very funny, but very undercutting, joke about removable car seats or “your awesome new Jetsons car.” Not because New York improvisers are a bunch of jokey bastards, but because we’re just not used to doing things that way and we’d have to say something about it.
• iO Harold teams have 9 people, not 8.
• Fewer girl improvisers out there in Chicago, we noticed. Also, zero (NOTICEABLE) racial minorities on the teams we saw.
• Almost all first beats started out with three people. About half the time they’d all be active from the top of the scene, other times one improviser would take up a secondary stage position as a security guard, shop keeper, etc. and only interact with the primary characters if and when it was needed. I liked this a lot. It’s easy to get tired of the same old empty Holodeck look, and I bet it’s nice to have an extra set of eyes and ears on stage to help guide you toward the fun.
• Group games seemed way less groupy. Few if any “get in here, you [members of some workplace, association, or other demographic]” group games, and most of them didn’t even start out with even half of the team on stage. They were more organic and weird. Some of them were like old silent films or clown acts. Also some of them were series of rapidly intercut exchanges, sometimes similar to the “beat the hell out of the game” exercise where you go on an endless run of tag outs.
• The shows are hosted by performers from show itself, instead of by people promoting their own shows, so all of that business is short and sweet.
• In between Harolds, the team that just performed and the team that’s about to perform all come onstage to either play a round of “Freeze,” or interview an audience member and do a quick “Dream.” Not a big fan of either of these things, but the stronger teams played them really well. Vero and I both went up for dream interviews (on separate nights) because you can’t be an audience volunteer in your own city without looking like a tool.
• Two or three teams perform in a block of two hours. Sometimes a Harold team opens for a show team, which gets top billing. So on the schedule it might have Improvised Star Trek listed, and in the show description it says “accompanied by an iO Harold team.” Weird, but cool!
• iO has a ton of Harold teams - 25 to 30 at any one time, and there are Harold shows every night. The schedule changes every few months, with a few teams added and a few cut.
• Most/all of the “show” teams (i.e. non-Harold teams) were much smaller - 3 to 5 people. This matched my impression that Chicago likes the smaller veteran teams, but I probably only had that impression because it’s far more likely for a small team to ever make it to NYC in the first place.

That’s all I’ve got. Fun trip. Good shows.

ImprovTeams stuff

NewYork.ImprovTeams.com passed the 1,000-user mark some time in the last few days. There are way more improvisers signed up from New York than from any other city (1,013 out of 1,345). Over 70% of users are “active,” i.e. they confirmed their accounts. Still no confirmation from Amy Poehler.

Still trying to figure out what I can do with ImprovTeams.com that will make it more useful for show promotion in addition to being a means of internal communication/organization for the community. I’m adding a reviews/suggestions section where improvisers will be able to add a book or movie and summarize why they think it’s essential comedy consumption.

Also thinking about adding show comments so there’s an archive of highlights. I think Jesse Lee suggested this a while ago, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Chicago

For aaaages I’ve said or heard said, “Let’s go to Chicago and soak up some DEEP DISH improv.” I love DCM (submitting with four or five teams this year) but it’d be nice to see everyone in their natural environments and check out teams that don’t make the trek.

Vero had a Jet Blue voucher and decided to use it for JUST THIS PURPOSE and we’re now sitting in JFK waiting for our flight. We’ll be there til Sunday.

Can’t wait to see some iO Harold teams and TJ & Rush tonight. Tomorrow we’re doing the iO jam show (they charge for it? what?) and will initiate every scene with obnoxiously obscure NYC specifics, then drop the mike and holler “Easter East Cooooooooast!”

“Run” by Collective Soul

I promise at some point in my life I’ll direct a movie that not only has this song on its soundtrack, but puts “Dosage” back on the charts.