Reviewed!
We got a great review last week in the East Bay Express. Of course the show is over now, but still:
Meanwhile in San Francisco, the Un-Scripted Theater Company is improvising full-length stage musicals in the style of the non-musical playwright of your choice. The group has done fully improvised musicals before — notably The Great Puppet Musical and the holiday show Let It Snow — but this is the first go-round for Theater: The Musical. Over the month of May a rotating cast of actors has been coming up with two-act tuners in the mode of David Mamet, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. (Simon wrote Sweet Charity, but rules are made to be broken.)
The night we saw the show it happened to be an all-female cast and the playwright chosen from audience suggestions was Lillian Hellman. (No one uses her book for Candide anymore, so it's easy to pretend she never wrote musicals.) Usually five out of the pool of ten actors perform, but this time six women quickly whipped up the characters and story arc on the spot and belted out improvised lyrics to the spontaneous keyboard compositions of David Norfleet.
More melodrama than comedy, the plot that emerged was somewhat inspired by The Children's Hour in exploring fear, loathing, and sapphic suspicions at a girls' boarding school. Susan Snyder became the new teacher, Mandy Khoshnevisan the snobby establishmentarian, Karen Hirst the spiteful gossip, Tara McDonough the awkward nerd, Debra Shifrin the budding idealist, and Laurie Glapa the absent-minded dean.
Some songs were meandering, others remarkably catchy, but on the whole what emerged was often quite funny and more solidly constructed than some scripted musicals that have passed through the neighborhood. (Lestat comes to mind.) When there were long pauses, especially when things were still taking shape, the actors used the awkwardness as a character choice.
Because each performance is an entirely different show than the last, you could see three completely new musicals in the one weekend remaining, each never to be seen again. Theater: The Musical isn't just subverting musical theater by making it look easy — in a particularly immediate form, it's what live theater is all about.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, the Un-Scripted Theater Company is improvising full-length stage musicals in the style of the non-musical playwright of your choice. The group has done fully improvised musicals before — notably The Great Puppet Musical and the holiday show Let It Snow — but this is the first go-round for Theater: The Musical. Over the month of May a rotating cast of actors has been coming up with two-act tuners in the mode of David Mamet, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. (Simon wrote Sweet Charity, but rules are made to be broken.)
The night we saw the show it happened to be an all-female cast and the playwright chosen from audience suggestions was Lillian Hellman. (No one uses her book for Candide anymore, so it's easy to pretend she never wrote musicals.) Usually five out of the pool of ten actors perform, but this time six women quickly whipped up the characters and story arc on the spot and belted out improvised lyrics to the spontaneous keyboard compositions of David Norfleet.
More melodrama than comedy, the plot that emerged was somewhat inspired by The Children's Hour in exploring fear, loathing, and sapphic suspicions at a girls' boarding school. Susan Snyder became the new teacher, Mandy Khoshnevisan the snobby establishmentarian, Karen Hirst the spiteful gossip, Tara McDonough the awkward nerd, Debra Shifrin the budding idealist, and Laurie Glapa the absent-minded dean.
Some songs were meandering, others remarkably catchy, but on the whole what emerged was often quite funny and more solidly constructed than some scripted musicals that have passed through the neighborhood. (Lestat comes to mind.) When there were long pauses, especially when things were still taking shape, the actors used the awkwardness as a character choice.
Because each performance is an entirely different show than the last, you could see three completely new musicals in the one weekend remaining, each never to be seen again. Theater: The Musical isn't just subverting musical theater by making it look easy — in a particularly immediate form, it's what live theater is all about.
Labels: improv, review, Theater The Musical
posted by Alan Goy at
4:19 PM
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