Rehearsal #1: Theatre the Musical

We had our first rehearsal last night for Theatre the Musical. The premise of the show is simple: Take a playwright and improvise a show in the style of that playwright… only as a musical. We’ll play everything straight and the comedy will come from the juxtaposition. I mean, lets face it, Ibsen or Becket as a musical is comedy enough right there, let alone the untapped melodic potential of Mamet, Wasserstein, Albee, Miller… need I go on?

Last night we started by getting to know each other a bit. We have three people in the show who’ve never been in one of our shows before, and one understudy who is completely new as well. In fact the understudy has no improv experience at all, but has opera experience. Between rehearsals, my intro class, and Christian’s Thursday night class, we hope to have her up to speed to perform in at least a couple of shows by May. Otherwise, we’ll just enjoy having her voice around.

Then we worked on various status and style matching exercises. Style matching is one of the cornerstones of Un-Scripted’s improv philosophy. If you can style match, you can play any genre, even ones you know nothing about, as long as one cast member does. You just style match the person who knows what they’re doing. This allowed us to do a Brecht long form that drew a standing ovation when only a couple cast members knew anything about Brecht.

Then we closed by working on some improvised Mamet. The newbies leapt into it pretty well, though I noticed a tendency to rush and add more information than was necessary. Christian, our fearless director, isn’t so good at improvising Mamet, largely because he’s not a big fan of the playwright in general. He did quite good though.

I have no nugget of blinding incite to give you all from this first rehearsal. As we move forward, I’m sure epiphanies will follow. In the meantime, you have 2 weeks left to see our current show: Three (also designed to be more like a modern play than a traditional improv show.)

(photo: Brecht)