Improv and Bad Movies

This article, aside from being hysterically funny, was clearly written by someone with a working knowledge of improv:

The Single Most Ridiculous Movie Premise Ever Made

Read the whole thing to see what I mean. It's about the movie Tiptoes the trailer for which circulated around the interwebs a while back in the "I can't believe this was an actual movie" category. Don't miss Gary Oldman in "the role of a lifetime!"

Rehearsal #5: Dancing with the Improvisors

We rehearsed last night in a mirrored dance studio at ACT, largely because our regular space was booked but also so we could do some serious dance work. We started with the standard dance warm-up, made all the more interesting by the option of looking at yourself in a mirror doing it. Then we went into the choreography teaching exercise.

Alyssa took a small group of 4 people out on to the ACT balcony and taught them a wonderfully simple dance that involved standing in a straight line while bouncing and leaning in different directions. Of course, I do not do it justice. It was wonderful. Karen took the rest of the group (one of the assigned choreographers had thought they were on the schedule for next week) and put us into a long sequence of stepping around and crossing each other. Again, I do not do it justice, but large group numbers are very effective.

From there we moved into some couples dancing. We always work on couples dancing in Let It Snow rehearsals, but so rarely do we do it in shows. I’m not sure why. I’d love to see it and do it in a show. I think one hurdle is that it’s hard to do in groups because everyone has such a tenuous grasp of the footwork that they can only do it over one span of distance. With every couple traveling at different rates, traffic jams become problematic and messy. But maybe one couple doing some dancing behind someone singing a solo would be easier to work into a show? I don’t know. I’ll have to hunt for ideas.

Then we warmed up our singing voices with some Dona Nobis Pacem and did a Color/Advance exercise. We did it once telling a story and then we did it again singing a song. It was amazing how much more natural coloring is while singing. We often talk about not putting plot elements into our songs, and I think that exercise really drove home how little plot you need in a song. I think I even learned more from directing the other person’s song than I did singing my own.

Then we moved into some faux opening numbers. “Faux” because we didn’t focus on the words at all. We mostly sang gibberish. The focus was on the backup dancing. We worked on developing movement to go along with our choruses and on crisping up the background dancing during verses.

I think the biggest thing we learned from all this was “Commitment”. Commit to your movement, and it’s ok to put all of your energy into one gesture rather than having lots of extraneous movement. As clay said “have a moment, not a seizure.”

We also learned that having a “leader” during the backup dancing behind verses makes them so much easier. So, commit to being the leader. Either take control or if you sense that you’re in charge, go all the way with it. And, perhaps more importantly, don’t be afraid to say what you’re doing. Tell everyone in plain English what attitude you want them to affect or what dance move you want them to do or what direction you want them to go. It’s easy to forget you can direct movement with your voice, but it’s so helpful when people do it.

Then we closed by singing some solos (or rather having everyone sing their own solo simultaneously) with the focus being on dancing during the song, either while singing or during a clearly defined dance break. Frankly, in terms of my own work, I’m discovering that I like exploring footwork more than arm or torso movement. But I also discovered that the more footwork I did, the more natural arm and torso movement became. I’ll have to push that further.

(Sunset from the ACT balcony last night)

Rehearsal #4: Oops, I missed it

I did not go to rehearsal this week as I was recovering from some strange non-flu virus that had me sleeping 24 hours a day. Here's Clay's picture from rehearsal:



As I understand it, they started with this week's choreographers teaching their dances:

Clay -- aggressive poppy hip-hop
Trish -- tense contemporary conflict (Massive Attack!)
Merrill -- flirty girl pop

Then they did some singing and finally some show starts.

Rehearsal #3: Formations

Last night at rehearsal we started a little late due to the crazy rain storm we had yesterday. We moved pretty quickly into Mandy’s dance warm-up, which you can see in all of its glory here. And then split up into three groups so that three more cast members could teach us choreography. Susan taught her group a Fosse-esque tap routine. Dave (the group I was in) taught some zombie dancing, and Michael led some sexy partner dancing. The big take a ways were: 1. moving towards or away form the audience looks cool. 2. looking like you’re having a good time is way more important than being spot on with the dance moves.

From there we went over some group dance formations. Things like circles, lines, columns. And ways to move around in those formations. In previous shows we’ve tended to get locked into one or two formations. We’re trying break out of that and make things more textured.

Then we warmed up our singing voices and practiced some Verse/Chorus songs in a circle before attempting some actual opening numbers.

The opening number of Let It Snow has always been very structured. It’s a good way to kick the show off right and set the tone for the rest of the night. Mandy & Susan are mixing it up in several ways. First off, instead of one person going out to set the chorus, everyone is going to go out and “inhabit an environment”. Mill around, interact. Be somewhere that suggests the town. Then one person will emerge to sing the song’s first verse, while everyone’s still inhabiting the world. Then a second person will start singing the chorus. Everyone will notice them. Then when everyone repeats the chorus along with them, they’ll assume a formation. We’ll return to that formation for every chorus, but assume new formations during the verses. That will hopefully spur some more movement. Fortunately so many people in the cast have done this show before and everyone can handle all this complexity.

We did three opening numbers last night. The three towns we did escape me at the moment, but the details weren’t important. The important thing was seeing that structure in action and seeing that it can work and look good. We also learned to “mill” with purpose and energy, to really grab the moment when you want to sing the next verse or set the chorus. The new structure makes it less apparent who’s going to sing next.

Next week we focus more on improv and the week after on dance. The shows coming up fast! Did you know that ticket are already on sale? From now until November 1, you can use the coupon code “SPECIAL” to get 25% off when you buy tickets through our website. Buy Ticket Here.

Every Day Improv

Susan's teaching a class in the East Bay in October:

Every Day Improv with Susan Snyder
Enjoy exploring the world of improvisation in a low pressure, playful environment.
Increase your confidence, improve your public speaking skills, and enjoy the experience along the way. This class is for adults wanting their first taste of improv, and those returning to deepen their range of improvisational expression. Shy people welcome.

Dates: Sundays, October 18 & 25
Time: 12:30-3:30pm
Location: Temescal Arts Center, Oakland, CA
(street parking, walking distance from MacArthur BART)
Cost: $40 single class/ sign up for 2 or more $30 a class

Contact Susan

Rehearsal #2: A Little Bit of Everything

For our second rehearsal for Let It Snow we did a little bit of dancing, a little bit of singing, and a little bit of improv. Sort of an overview of the entire show.

I got lead my favorite name-game warm-up exercise for the firs time with this cast. Since we didn’t do the exercise during the auditions, this was several cast members first time playing. Even so, it went very smoothly. We made it all the way up to four patterns. It went so smoothly in fact, I kept thinking I was doing something wrong in leading it.

Mandy and Susan want everyone in the cast to experience being a choreographer. At every rehearsal three people have to teach a group of 3-4 other cast members some sort of choreographed dance. I was one of the choreographers this week. We had to choreograph a minimum of 16 counts, so that’s what I did. It was mostly stepping and jazz hands with one complicated turn. In any case, it took me the entire 10 minutes to teach it.

Then as we watched the other groups perform their dances, I was astounded to see how complicated and long other people’s pieces were. I should have done more, but at the same time I showed all you really needed to do was 16 counts. Still, good to see how far people are willing to push things.

Then we worked on the Verse/Chorus song structure we’ve been experimenting with. Instead of starting a song with a chorus, we start a song with a verse. Then the second person to sing sets the chorus. It’s more like regular songs, but can be tricky. Still, it went well. We followed that up by singing duets. Mandy and Susan had everyone pair up and sing a duet all at the same time. That way everyone got to sing 3 songs.

Finally we did two show-starts. Susan had printed out some brief info on small towns that we used as suggestions and then dove into the first three scenes of a show. We did Genoa, NV and Cranbury, NJ. I was in the Cranbury one and played a not-so-swift hardware store employee who confused “asphalt” for “screws”. There was some good word play in that scene including Susan saying “I think you’re screwed” and Dave singing a song about it not being his “fault” they were out of “asphalt”.

The take-aways, I think, were to look for themes to develop (“Nevada started here in Genoa, so we’re going to start something”) and to remember small towns do have upper to upper-middle class residents (we tend to only ever play working-class folk). We also saw perhaps the first scene in a Let It Snow rehearsal or show ever to take place in someone’s garage. Lisa also did some kick-ass space object work establishing the hardware store.

Rehearsal #1: Dancing and Group Scenes

We had our first rehearsal for Let It Snow! 2009 last night. We’ve done this show three times previously (2004, 2005, and 2007) making it our first quadruple threat show! (I think we did only did You Bet Your Improvisor and The Short and the Long of It three times each, but the complete list of all Un-Scripted shows seems to have not survived the new web redesign. Hopefully it will be reappearing soon.) But we’ve never done Let It Snow! like this before. For the first time ever, someone other than Tara is directing it.

Tara developed the show based largely on her experiences growing up in a small town in Maine. In fact, she was so committed to her vision of the show that she has moved back to a small town in Maine. This regrettably makes her unavailable to direct the show. This year the show is being directed by Mandy with a healthy dose of assisting from Susan. Now, while audience members frequently confuse Mandy for Tara or Susan for Tara, technically speaking Mandy & Susan are not Tara. Rather than wondering “What Would Tara Do?” Mandy & Susan are going to just going to do what they would do within the same framework. Thus the show will inherently be different, because, as previously stated Mandy & Susan are not Tara.

This show marks a number of other firsts. It will be the first time ensemble member Clay has ever performed in Let It Snow! It will also be the first show Trish performs in as an ensemble member. We also have a nice mix of returning and new cast members. The full list is:

Bryce Byerley - ensemble
Dave Dyson - ensemble
Michael Fleming – previously in Shakespeare the Musical
Alan Goy - ensemble
Merrill Gruver – previously in Shakespeare the Musical
Alyssa Harvey – previously in Fear
Karen Hirst – previously in Theater the Musical and Let It Snow!
Scott Keck – previously in… many shows.
Mandy Khoshnevisan - ensemble
Clay Robeson - ensemble
Jodi Skeris – new!
Susan Snyder - ensemble
Trish Tillman - ensemble
Christian Utzman - ensemble
Lisa Wang – new!

And we got off to a fine start last night. We opened with some ice-breaking exercises so we could all get to know each other and then launched right into dancing. Mandy ran us through a series of moves and then made everyone lead the group in some dancing to different styles. It was a workout, fortunately I’ve been hitting the gym in recent months to prepare.

We capped off the day with some improv! We worked on group scenes where several characters ganged up on another for some reason. Why? Because those scenes generally give the audience the sense that the characters all know each other very well. As Keith Johnstone says (paraphrased) “friends play with each other’s status while strangers leave each other’s status alone.” But these scenes are often difficult to improvise, as they can easily devolve into everyone talking over each other.

All-in-all we did a reasonably good job. We learned to focus on nuance and relationships as opposed to activities. I was in one scene the set up for which was a group of people waiting outside for the fishing license shop to open for the season. Quickly it became endowed as ice-fishing season and Scott and Karen launched in with Northern Minnesotan “Fargo” accents. I was amazed at how much fun I had doing the Fargo accent and how easily I was able to do it. Within the scene I was actually aware of how I wasn’t thinking about the accent at all. It was just coming out. I love doing accents and I’d forgotten how much I love doing Fargo.

Mostly though we all did a good job of talking over each other just enough to look like friends, while still being able to hear what was going on. A promising start!

Let It Snow! - Auditions

Improvisors Wanted!

The Un-Scripted Theater Company is holding auditions for its next show, Let It Snow!, an improvised musical for the holidays, filled with good old-fashioned Broadway singing and dancing. (Think The Music Man.) The show is set every night in the hometown of an audience member, and over the three seasons that we've performed the show, we've visited small towns from North Pole AK to Manunka Chunk NJ to Wailua HI, and lots of places in between. It's a really fun show to perform, and always an audience (and improvisor) favorite.

We're looking for improvisors who ideally have longform experience as well as an enthusiasm for singing/dance.

** Auditions will be in the evening, on Monday, Sept. 14th, and Tuesday, Sept. 15th.
Rehearsals will be on Tuesdays, starting Sept. 29th; the show runs
Nov. 19th - Dec. 19th.
All of the above in downtown SF near Union Square.

If you're interested in auditioning, email Susan (click here) for more information or to reserve yourself a slot -- make sure to mention which date you'd prefer. Our auditions are conducted more like a rehearsal or class, so be prepared to stay for at least an hour. If you're wondering whether you should audition, the answer is almost always yes! We pride ourselves on our fun, low-pressure auditions, and we always love meeting improvisors, so come on down and give it a shot!

www.un-scripted.com

Ensemble Rehearsal #7: Genre Combo

This week we multitasked by having a business meeting first and then rehearsal. Fortunately we were able to plow through our meeting agenda fairly quickly and still have time for a reasonable rehearsal.

As per usual, we sang some Verse/Chorus songs. Then we practiced the format we’ve accidentally performed at our last two shows (the SF Theater Fest and the Temporary Improv Fest). That being getting 3-4 genres from the audience and doing them all at the same time. Let’s see if I can remember what we did:

70’s Detective TV Show, Jane Austen, Brecht
Slasher, Mark Twain, Shakespeare
80’s B-Movie Sci-Fi, Caveman, Checkov

It’s really impossible to process all of them at once. Generally you have to use one genre mostly as setting and another for character or plot elements. At any given time your just focusing on one or two hoping someone else is picking up the others. It works fairly well. We also think they work better when at least one of the genres is more general (like “tragedy” or “horror”).

That was pretty much it. Again, a short rehearsal.

The Toiletries That Ate San Francisco

In 2006, the Un-Scripted Theater Company did a show called the Impossible Film Project. The show worked something like this:

A team of improvisors and a director wih a camera get a suggestion from a live audience and then take to the streets of San Francisco to shoot a movie guerrilla style. As they finish a tape, it's run back to the theater where the audience sees it almost live.

I was fortunate enough to be in a few of these and serve as the director/camera man on a few as well. This was one of my favorites. We had a lot of fun making it and I have never actually seen the entire thing before. (The nature of the show meant you didn't get to see the film you were shooting screened.) Now it's all up on YouTube and I can present to you The Toiletries That Ate San Francisco!

For this film the suggestion was an actual object, a bag of toiletries an audience member had with them. The improvisors had no pre-planned script. All they knew was the style of the movie: 1950's B-Movie.

Featuring:
Kimberley MacLean as Buffy
Maggie Farril as Bambi
Christian Utzman as Dick Moondoggie
and in an uncredited role:
Brian McBride as The Mad Scientist

and countless extras from the streets of San Francisco

Directed by Alan Goy

Ensemble Rehearsal #6: Steady Going

I don’t have too too much to report about Tuesday’s ensemble rehearsal. We leapt right into more of the Verse Chorus Verse songs I mentioned in Rehearsal 4 with similarly strong results. Then we went back to the exercises we did in Rehearsal 2 that resulted in the inadvertent one-acts. Again they were really solid.

We told a story about some distracted bank robbers that turned into a game of “torture Bryce’s character”. There was an epic futuristic war story that veered too cinematic in style and didn’t feel as much like a play. Then we had Pinter meets Albee meets Becket in a story about gambling and rent payments. That one was fun. Finally we told an upper British love tragedy about a butler pining for his mistress.

We experimented with ways to make the characters more diverse while still style matching with some success. In the “gambling” one I consciously tried to style match while playing a completely different pace than the other characters. It was hard, but I think it worked.

Improv For Everyone

Susan's teaching a class in the East Bay in September:

Improv for Everyone with Susan Snyder
Enjoy exploring the world of improvisation in a low pressure, playful environment. Increase your confidence, improve your public speaking skills, and enjoy the experience along the way. This class is for people wanting their first taste of improv, and those returning to deepen their range of improvisational expression. Shy people welcome.

Dates: Sunday, Sept 13th & Sunday Sept 26th
Time: 12:30-3:30pm
Location: Temescal Arts Center, Oakland, CA
(street parking, walking distance from MacArthur BART)
Cost: $40 single class or sign up for both for $60

Contact Susan

Ensemble Rehearsal #4: The Best

After starting rehearsal learning some Bollywood dance choreography as a warm up, we spent some time discussing, among other things, what we wanted to be working on. We realized that we often spend a lot of time focusing on our faults as improvisors and how we can improve them. Of course, because of the nature of the art form, we have to do this so we are all capable of juggling any and all balls that might get thrown at us. As an example: I need to be able to play the hero, villain, love interest, or side characters depending on what the show needs.

But what we don’t do is push ourselves to get better at the things we’re already good at. Bryce is really good at playing villains. How can we push him to get better at playing villains? If we start giving each other notes on what we’re good at and challenging each other to get even better, we’ll find out what we’re good at, grow in new ways, and learn new things that everyone can benefit form. Very exciting.

It all reminded me of something I had heard August Wilson say in a master class. Every time he sat down to write a play he set out to write the best play that had ever been written. Otherwise, what was the point? Why bother? I tried to research an actual cited version of that quote and what I found was even better:

For years I sat in that chair and tried to best my predecessors, to write the best play that’s ever been written. That was my goal until I ran across a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright, who said he didn’t want to be the best architect who ever lived. He wanted to be the best architect who was ever going to live. That added fuel to the fire and raised the stakes, so to speak. Now you’re not only doing battle with your predecessors but with your successors as well. It drives you to write above your talent. And I know that’s possible to do because you can write beneath it.

That’s how I want to write. That’s how I want to improvise.

Then we moved on to singing. Typically when we sing songs in rehearsal we do a “Chorus/Verse” song, where one person starts by setting a chorus, we all repeat it, and then we all take turns doing verses. Except we never end up singing songs like that in shows, and really, very songs are like that to begin with.

During the last Shakespeare show, they worked on “Verse/Chorus” songs. The idea was to start with a verse, like most songs do, then the next person sets the chorus (but we do not repeat it together yet). The next person does a verse and then everyone sings the chorus together. Then everyone takes turns singing verses. The result is much more like an actual song, and hopefully more likely to happen I a show (with practice).

We took this a step further though and tried to merge with the exercise the work we had done on acting in other people’s styles. The idea was to mimic the person’s singing style. Not the notes, but the tamber, cadence, vowel structure, etc. This pushed people outside of their normal vocal patterns and pointed out patterns and habits that we people had. All very useful.

Ensemble Rehearsal #2: Inadvertant One-Acts

For the first time ever, the Un-Scripted Theater Company has been having ensemble rehearsals where we get together and play without preparing for any specific show. Last night we had the second one of these and did some really interesting work that was simultaneously unlike anything we usually do while still being stereotypical of our work.

We started by doing a character movement exercise lead by Mandy. There’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is. It involves moving around the room and taking on different physical characteristics as a way to experiment with different physicalities and movement styles. We wanted to work with how movement influences character and break out of the movement ruts we individually typically fall into to.

To move this idea into scene work, we did a variation on an exercise Christian often uses in his classes. One person started a scene as a character they wanted to see inhabit a world. Then other people came in not exactly mimicking that character (because we didn’t want scenes with 5 of the same character) but mimicking that person’s acting style, as if everyone in the scene had graduated from the same 8 year acting school. Similar speech and movement but not identical. Coming from the same place, but not the same.

The resulting scenes were more like one-act plays than any scenes I’ve ever seen trying to be one-act plays. We theorized a number of reasons for this. One being that because every character in a play is written by the same person, all of the characters have a similarity that this mimicking recreated in our scenes. Another was that we weren’t entering the scenes at the next plot point but at the next character point. We didn’t enter once we knew what should happen next, but we entered once we had the next character that should be in the world. As a result the scenes didn’t have strong protagonists, yet felt like every character was the protagonist at one moment or another. (Something we had worked on more directly and less successfully during Theater The Musical.)

No one ever felt pressured in these scenes to come up with what should happen next. Even when something was happening in the scenes, the scenes weren’t about that. They were about the characters and their relationships, which are what stories should be about but often aren’t.

Every scene we did could have been fleshed out into an entire play (or I suppose a sketch if that’s how your mind works) or could have been a brilliant improv scene in performance. Here’s a brief list of the scenes with hopefully just enough detail to jog my memory down the line:

- A disgruntled teacher’s lounge with a gay yoga instructor and a classic porn stash.
- A “black widow” haunted by her murdered husbands and a “black widower” haunted by his murdered wives go on a date and decide to join forces: Blithe Spirit meets Arsenic and Old Lace meets The Brady Bunch.
- A cowardly deputy saves the town in spite of himself. Tarrantino meets Deadwood meets Blazing Saddles.
- Two strangers finally speak to each other on a subway train after countless train rides together.

And many others. I wish we’d taped the rehearsal.

BOB Voting

Voting for Best of the Bay 2009 ends TODAY at 5pm. So while you’re voting on PAGE 2 for the “Un-Scripted Theater Company” for the BEST THEATER COMPANY category, here are some of my picks (ok, they're actually Christian's and I copied them from his Facebook) that I think you should consider for your vote as well. Remember, you can vote from anywhere in the world, so tell your parents to get out the vote for the things you love in the Bay Area too.
http://www.sfbg.com/bobpoll2009/

Best Dessert – Bi-Rite Creamery
Best Bakery – Tartine
Best Theater Company – Un-Scripted Theater Company
Best Emerging Artist – Uriah Duffy
Best Dive Bar – Zeitgeist
Best Burlesque Act – Tit 4 Tat
Best Place to Buy Bikes and Gear – Manifesto
Best Place to Buy Vinyl – 1-2-3-4 Go
Best Local Designer – Wild Card
Best Quirky Specialty Store – 5 and Diamond
Best Place to Meet Someone – Baxtalo Drom The Lucky Road
Best First Date Spot – Paxton Gate
Best Local Web Site – un-scripted.com
Best Bicycle Mechanics – Freewheel Bike Shop
Best Arts Organization – Half Priced Ticket Booth in Union Square
Best Classic Artist – Dave Warnke

Let your voice be heard! In 50 words or less - This is a great place to tell the world how much you love the Un-Scripted Theater Company.

What I've Learned About Directing

From the Flickr Commons

I’m in the midst of tech week for the show I’m directing for Impact, or “hell week” as it is often called. Directing an improv show and a scripted show back-to-back has been a stark reminder to me about the differences in the two processes. Over all, both are easier and more difficult at the same time. There really is no equivalent to hell week for an improv show, or at least it’s not on the same scale.

I also learned a lot doing these two shows back-to-back, or perhaps I learned more from simply directing for the first time in 4 years or more. The main lesson I’ve learned about directing an improv show is that it’s more like teaching a class than putting a show together. As a result it requires a much more well thought out curriculum from the very beginning, well before the first rehearsal or even the auditions. Un-Scripted: unscripted, being a show that did not require an obvious set of specific skills to perform, in retrospect I should have picked a set of skills that I wanted to work on and constructed the rehearsals around that larger purpose. That seems so obvious now, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it originally, but alas I did not.

As for what I’ve learned about directing a scripted play, I’ve learned I need to communicate better with my designers, push them and the actors harder, and generally trust my instincts. Perhaps it’s less trusting my instincts and learning to recognize my instincts. If something doesn’t seem right, it’s probably wrong.

Un-Scripted: unscripted Wrap Up

Posting about our Bollywood show in Chicago made me realize I never really wrapped up the posts about Un-Scripted: unscripted.

As I mentioned, I was not at Rehearsal #9 because I had already started rehearsals for Impact Briefs: Puberty . Here though is the rehearsal in time-lapse:


I also missed all but 1 show closing weekend as I was on a business trip in Dallas. I did however catch closing night which featured the best last scene of a run ever:


All told, we upload 16 clips from the show, which you can watch here.

If you'd like to watch the entire rehearsal process in time lapse from beginning to end, here it is!

Bollywood in Chicago

“Sold out weeks ago” I believe was the statement I had heard weeks ago, and yet there was a notable contingent of empty seats in the house Saturday night for our performance of The Great Puppet Bollywood Extravaganza at the Chicago Improv Festival. (I’m fairly certain we had a larger crowd for our show at the festival back in 2005.) Hmm… I am told the marketing material for the festival contained a very poor description of our show (a “90 minute puppet show” or some such) which just goes to show you should always pitch the show you’re actually doing not the one you think your audiences want to see.

In any case, we still put on a fun and solid show for the folks who braved an unseasonably warm and drizzly Chicago night for the 11:30pm show. Fortunately the good folks of the festival gave us a full 2 hour time-slot in an actual theater to do our show. (Most improv in Chicago is an hour long which we learned is partially because theaters rent space by the hour for about the same amount we get space for an entire evening.) Unfortunately this meant our show didn't end until almost 1:30. You haven't lived until you've taken an intermission at 12:15am.

I’m sure eventually we will get some footage up on our YouTube channel, but for the time being, here’s the show summary that will appear in this week’s email:

Pooja, Sagar, & Raja's Excellent Adventure or A Revolution in Time

Sagar (Christian) and Raja (Alan as puppet George) take a job with the eccentric village plumber (Dave as puppet Andy) so they can court his daughter Pooja (Mandy). But Pooja is betrothed to the evil Rajiv (Clay as puppet Dungeon) whose father, the mad Dr. Chowdhury (Jenny as a finger puppet) wants to take over the village with his inhuman ideas about science. Instead of working on her father's wind-powered indoor plumbing device, Pooja, Sagar, and Raja build a time machine that takes them on an adventure across time and space and pirates. Will their travels save Pooja from her arranged marriage, the town from destruction, and Raja from certain death?

I managed to work in the phrase “What the fish?” many times, and helped shape a time travel plot that actually made sense, complete with my character from the future showing up in the present and dying at the top of the second half. This made for some really interesting scenes between my character in the present and the characters who knew I was going to die. Then of course came the highly satisfying scene near the end when my character finally got stabbed.

Drama you can only have with time travel really.

I think my singing was even halfway decent too, as I continue my quest to actually sing in my range. Much harder to do than it sounds.

Rehearsal #8: Keep it Going

As we get deeper and deeper into a show, especially a show that’s going fairly well, there becomes less and less to work on in rehearsal. They become more or less an opportunity to connect and keep everyone on the same page. That’s mostly what we did this week. We worked on some games (Oompa Loompa Comentary, Genre Combo, Genre Slide, Genre Roller Coaster, State Trooper) and ended early. It was also St. Patrick’s Day, and I didn’t want to keep people too late in case they had plans or just wanted to beat the drunken traffic home.

The show runs for two more weekends, but this is actually my last. I’m directing Impact Briefs: Puberty which opens in May and needs to start rehearsals ASAP. All that is to say, I likely will not blog about next week’s rehearsal as I won’t be there.

Rehearsal #7: Everything at Once

After a very successful first weekend of shows, we had rehearsal on Tuesday night. We started with a warm-up that I had noticed the cast of Saturday night’s show playing before the show. It involves standing in a circle and playing every improv circle warm-up game all at once with no introductions or explanations. One second your playing bipity bipity bop and the next your playing kitty wants a corner or the Dukes of Hazard, or anything really. And it doesn’t matter if people don’t know the game you’ve just switched to because the whole point is to style match and fake it, or just change the game right away to something you know.

We had a great time and laughed ourselves quite silly.

Then I wanted to move into an exercise in “building scenes” and style matching. The idea was for one person to come out on stage and say a couple things to help establish the type of scene they’re doing and for other people to come in and add to the scene while matching the tenor and style. Unfortunately moving to an exercise started by a single person onstage killed a lot of the energy we had just built up in the warm-up. In the future I might not lead with this exercise.

Then did another round of the bell-game exercise we did in Rehearsal #3 in order to break out of the “new choice” rut we fall into whenever a bell rings on a scene. After that, we did another rapid-fire round of introducing scenes and getting suggestions without stopping the show.

I’ve realized a better way to describe this concept is that every interaction with the audience or scene set up has to be done as a scene itself (which then leads organically into another scene, meaning you can’t have a scene to get the suggestion and then a completely unrelated scene using it). That also means improvisors can’t reference theatrical terms like “scene” or “actor” and such with out first establishing a context wherein that’s allowable. (“Welcome to the Westfield Community Theater Players production of such-and-such” etc.)

I admit it is difficult to come up with these creative intros and even harder to segue them into scenes without always using “now let’s see that film” or “now the Westfield Community Players will act that out”, but that is the point and challenge of the show. Just because it’s hard to do, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

Another way of looking at it is this, if you want to use the audience as an audience, you first have to establish that they’re not this audience in this theater watching Un-Scripted: unscripted. First you have to endow them as a different audience at a different show and then go from there.

Bryce was detained at work and arrived at rehearsal very late. When he arrived we ran him through the meat grinder by playing scene after scene with him until finally we were all ready to be done. We closed with another round of “every circle warm-up game at once” and that was the end! Watch it all in time-lapse:

Un-Scripted: unscripted Week 1

I had a moment in the show on Friday night that transcended being simply a “magic of improv” moment and became a “magic of storytelling” even a “magic of culture” moment.

I knew I wanted to do a scene with the bell (a little desktop bell-man’s bell frequently used in improv games), but I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. Because we’re not explaining many scenes in advance in this show, just about any scene might find itself “dinged” by the bell. Then it’s up to the improvisors in the scene to collectively and instantly decide what bell means, or what effect it has on the scene.

The default response tends to be New Choice, where the improvisor says or does something different from what they just said or did until the bell-ringer is satisfied with the new direction of the scene, but it could mean any number of things including Accent Switch, Genre Roller-coaster, Move-On, etc.

So I brought the bell out onstage and placed it on a chair, in a position of status, and then sat backwards in another chair looking at it intently. Mandy joined me onstage and as soon as the lights came up I said “I traded the beans for this bell.”

And that’s when it happened. A knowing chuckle rippled outwards through the audience as everyone in the theater and everyone in the cast knew that the bell was magic, without ever having to say the word “magic.”

That’s how I want to be able to tell stories, be they onstage or on paper.

**

We had a really solid opening weekend with three fun and well received shows. Saturday night was so sold-out that even I didn’t get a seat. So please buy your tickets in advance online. If you’d like to see some clips from last weekend’s shows, Clay has posted 6 scenes on the Un-Scripted YouTube Channel in High Definition (click the HD button for Hi-Def):

The Roman Empire Strikes Back - Parts 1, 2, and 3
Rap Battle: Chocolate vs. Crochet
Shrödinger’s Hepcat
Acting Class (with Joseph)

**

Here’s how I didn’t get a seat at Saturday’s show. As we were closing up the house, I took a quick glance at the audience and saw 1 free seat, which I assumed Bryce would take as he was taking notes that night. So I went out and headed up to the booth. A few seconds later Bryce came up to the booth saying there were no seats left. As the booth only holds two (Bryce and Joy who was running lights), I had no place from which to watch the show.

I heard parts of it.

Rehearsal #6: Final "Dress"

We had our last rehearsal before opening on Tuesday. After warming up we talked through a few business items related to the show and then launched into a quick tutorial on how to use puppets. We’ve worked with puppets a lot in Un-Scripted, and I’d love for them to make appearances in this show as well. We practiced with them a bit and then talked about how to interact with the audience (in general, not related to puppets).

Then we ran a couple mock first halves. I wouldn’t call them “dress rehearsals,” not only because we weren’t dressed for the show but because we were in a rehearsal space, not the theater and we did not have a keyboardist.

The first one went amazingly well. So well, in fact, I hope they can do as well tonight in the show! Highlights included:

Row Boat Cannibalism
Playbook Star Trek
and
Mamma I Don’t Wanna Learn Needlepoint or cut off my left breast to be an Amazon warrior.

The second one had a tough act to follow and was a little more shaky. Highlights included:

Australian/French/Japanese/Russian Children’s Shows
Silent Tea
and
Bryce’s beat poetry typewriter scene.

Tonight we open! Sweet. I don’t play until tomorrow. Tonight I take notes so I can help guide things in the right direction. Hope to see you there!

Play Schedule

Now, these are always somewhat subject to change, but here's when people are playing:


3/5/2009 8:00 Christian, Dave, Joy, Clay, Trish
3/6/2009 8:00 Alan, Scott, Jeff, Mandy, Trish
3/7/2009 8:00 Alan Christian, Jeff, Mandy, Scott, Trish
3/12/2009 8:00 Bryce, Clay, Dave, Joy, Trish
3/13/2009 8:00 Alan, Christian, Dave, Jeff, Trish
3/14/2009 3:00 Bryce, Christian Alan, Joy, Mandy, Scott
3/14/2009 8:00 Alan, Bryce, Joy, Mandy, Scott
3/19/2009 8:00 Alan, Bryce, Jeff, Joy, Mandy
3/20/2009 8:00 Alan, Clay, Jeff, Joy, Trish
3/21/2009 3:00 Alan, Bryce, Christian, Mandy, Scott
3/26/2009 8:00 Christian, Clay, Dave, Joy, Scott
3/27/2009 8:00 Clay, Dave, Jeff, Mandy, Trish
3/28/2009 3:00 Bryce, Christian, Joy, Scott, Trish
3/28/2009 8:00 Bryce, Christian, Clay, Dave, Mandy

Changes made 3/7/2009

Rehearsal #5: Birthday Rapping

We had David Norfleet at rehearsal last night so we could practice singing. After suitably warming up, we started by improvising some songs in the style of the Andrew’s Sisters. We do this by having one person stand in the middle with two other facing them. The middle singer sings a song, while the two on either side do their best to harmonize with the singer while singing the same words. It helps if they look directly at the singers mouth and learn to lip-read from profile.

Then we went over Mandy’s Barber Shop Quartet concept from last week. With some help from Mr. Norfleet, we were able to get this down into a fairly doable state. This basically involves a lead singer singing a song in 4 measure chunks, with the backup quartet repeating each line in harmony.

At this point, we took a break and had some lovely birthday cake in honor of Clay’s and Dave’s birthdays, both this week. Fully charged with our sugar rush, we moved into some point-of-view songs and scenes into songs before capping the evening off with me pimping people to sing songs I wanted to see them sing. Highlights included Scott & Jeff’s Beastie Boys style rap. Dave’s rap with Christian providing a “sample” chorus while Trish danced. And the Spring Break gang butt rape reunion song. Don’t ask.

Rehearsal #3 in Time-Lapse
Rehearsal #4 in Time-Lapse

And last night’s rehearsal:


You’ll notice the green background. We have a “Green Screen Challenge” going on right now for an as yet undetermined prize.

Rehearsal #4: Photo Mania

Tuesday's rehearsal was consumed by the photo shoot for the program and the flyer. It's always hard to get much done at a "photo shoot" rehearsal, but invariably they are necessary because they're the only time you know you'll have a chunk of the cast together at the same time.

To try and keep this one from being a complete wash, I told people to bring musical instruments. Then, anyone who wasn't onstage being photographed was in the back of the house jamming and improvising songs. I want music and song to be a big part of this show, and since this show really is about us having a good time, playing instruments we enjoy playing fits in perfectly. We will have a keyboardist at every show as well, but self-played instruments add so much (in a Sweeny Todd Revival sort of way).



As I was busy helping out with and occasionally art directing the photo shoot, I really have no idea how the jamming sessions went. Although I did hear a good song about a repo man and Scott sing a wonderful blues number.
The photo shoot itself went quite well and was tons of fun, as they usually are. Hopefully it resulted in some good shots and the overall concept for the flyer will actually work. I’ll post images here once we have it.

After we finished taking pictures, we broke down the photography equipment and worked on transitions into songs, either through scenes or in-character introductions. One of the highlights of this section of the rehearsal was a strange sort of interpretive dance. I’d love it if something like that happened in a show.

What sort of instruments did people bring that you might see played in a show if you came? Guitar, ukulele, two different kinds of drum, a squeeze box, a flute, and a harmonica (which I brought but really need to learn better how to play before I break it out in a show; my technique is good but I don’t know what notes I’m playing). And that doesn’t even include the acoustic base and mandolin that might also make its way to the shows.

We capped the evening off by experimenting with Mandy’s crazy idea on how to improvise Barbershop Quartet singing, which worked amazingly well. Once we’ve ironed out the kinks and I have a better grasp of what exactly we did, I’ll write more about it.

Only 2 more rehearsals left before we open! Ticket are on sale now. If you use the coupon code “special” when buying your tickets on Vendini between now and Tuesday 2/24, you get 25% off!

Also, see why Joy missed rehearsal.

Slide Show of the photo shoot:

Rehearsal #3: Just Have Fun

We were short handed at our third rehearsal. I knew Scott and Clay would be absent in advance due to previous conflicts, but then suddenly Trish and Bryce got sick. I’d originally planned on having the photo shoot for the flyer at rehearsal, but with so many people absent, I decided to reschedule it for next week.

This left me with a full three hours and 6 of the 10 cast members to kick around in. We got started with some warm-ups and got to know a couple of our new interns in the process. Then I wanted to move into working on games.

We started by going over spit-take. This is one of my favorite improv games and we ran a few practice scenes to show the people who had never seen it how it worked. For those of you unfamiliar with spit-take and the way we play it, this is spit-take: You play a scene wherein people are drinking water. When someone says something shocking, you spit out your water on them. This game is designed to teach having big reactions on stage. Over the years we’ve discovered a lot of finer points to the game (in the beginning it’s funnier not to spit) and find it best to practice it without water (miming the spitting).

After that I had people take turns playing a scene. At some point in the scene someone from off stage would “ding” it. Then the players had to decide for themselves what the ding meant. Were they playing new choice? Genere switch? Move on? Or, as we discovered, some new game? It was their choice. But of course they couldn’t talk about what game they were choosing to play, they each had to just start playing it, which made for some hysterical moments when players were playing different games from the same bell.

All this resulted in some fun new games. Things happened as a result of the bell ringing that I’d never seen before, such as inner monologue rapping, Upper Class Brit/Western Hick switch, and a food replicator gone haywire.

Then we ran the format for about an hour or so, or ran it as best we could without a musician or an audience. We had a lot of fun and discovered some more new games, such as Brecht Forward Reverse. That’s really the best part of this show, is discovering fun things in the moment. You can’t really do that if you’re locked into a set-list or if you have to set-up your scenes in advance. Just go do it and see what happens. It’s so much more fun.

**

We did shoot a time-lapse video of rehearsal, but it will have to wait until Clay returns from his Caribbean adventure to be posted to the intertubes.

Rehearsal #1: Knocking Off the Rust

Boy am I rusty! I haven’t directed anything since The Short and the Long of It in 2005, almost 4 years ago. That’s hard to believe given that at one time directing was what I wanted to do, as a career. Of course I wanted to direct scripted plays, because, you know, that’s where the money is.

My directing muscles have all atrophied. I need to do some serious work to get them back up to speed. Fortunately Christian and Mandy were both at rehearsal last night to pick up the slack when I lost all ability to articulate. Of course it didn’t help matters much that I was in the midst of a full on seasonal allergy attack coupled with the fact that we were rehearsing at Stage Werx, a wonderful space mind you, but one that I appear to be allergic to regardless of the season. All this is to say that I was stuffed up, exhausted, and generally spacey. Not good things to be when dusting off the directorial parts of one’s brain after a long period of disuse.

Under the circumstances, I think I did remarkably well. To begin with, I have a great cast. Not only do I have a full 6 ensemble members in the show, but Scott, Trish, and Jeff are all Un-Scripted veterans, and Joy, the newcomer in the cast, did improv with Clay back in Boston. So already there’s chemistry there.

I wanted to ease into things for our first rehearsal, so we started with my favorite name game and then moved into scene work. I had everyone set up a game they wanted to play or see played. Then I had everyone set up a scene in a genre they wanted to see. By the time we finished with that it was already 9:30 and my brain had officially started shutting down for the evening. We finished off with a rousing round of The Dukes of Hazard game that Jeff taught us during Bollywood.

All-in-all a solid start. Now I just need to figure out what we’re doing for the rest of the rehearsals.

You can watch last night’s rehearsal in its entirety shrunk down to 2 minutes through the glories of time lapse photography, our new favorite toy:

Callbacks and Casting

Wow, that was hard. We had callbacks on Wednesday night. They went really well, but I was left with the difficult task of whittling down 10 people to 2-4. In the end I opted for 4:

Joy Begbie
Jeff England
Scott Keck
Trish Tillman

That's three people have been in our shows before and one newcomer. I'm excited. I think they'll stretch us in good directions and we'll stretch them likewise. Now I just have to decide what to do at these rehearsals that start Tuesday.

Baylist! Vote Now!

Un-Scripted has been nominated for Best Theater Company in the SF Gate's BayList! Vote now to give kudos to local things you love -- like Un-Scripted! You need to register and login to vote, but it's wort it to vote for us, right?

Sunday at the Retreat with a Time Lapse Camera

The Math of Improv!

Audition Recap

I am directing our next show, Un-Scripted: unscripted, and we had auditions Monday and Tuesday night! We always try to make our auditions as low-stress and fun as possible, and it seems to work pretty well. Both nights we did essentially the same things, so here’s the breakdown.

We started by forming a big circle so I could introduce myself and the rest of the production team, explain the show, and explain what specifically I was looking for to get cast in the show. This show is really about ensemble, so the ability to make other people look good and have a good time is very important. We’re also looking for strong committed acting skills, because once this show starts, no one ever plays themselves on stage.

Then I ran my favorite name game. At Un-Scripted we tend to call it “Alan’s Name Game” even though I lay no claim on inventing it. (In fact I recently learned that improv musician Joshua Raoul Brody invented it.) I just like to play it and generally lead it when we do. It’s a name pattern game that I’ll explain in more detail someday.

Then I had everyone break up into pairs and tell some word at a time stories. Then in different pairs I had them play What Are You Doing. There are actually 2 ways of playing that game. I had Clay set it up and since he only knew the one way (the non-sequitor way), that’s how we did it. We’ll probably play it the other way at callbacks.

At this point I wanted to dive right into scene work. Both nights we had a lot of people, so the more I could see them the better. To start with I had 5 auditioners come up on stage with 2 members of the Un-Scripted ensemble and had them do 3 scenes in a row of anything they wanted. They could set up games. They could just do scenes. It didn’t matter. Cycling through this a few times was a good way to get everyone warmed up and to see how they do in short “laughy” scenes, scenes that are about finding the quick laugh and end as soon as they’ve peaked.

After a short break, I started setting people up in scenes. Or rather, I would select the people I wanted to see and Clay would give them a set up. Then I might side coach the scene or stop it to give direction and restart it, if I wanted to push people, test their range, or simply just see how they take direction.

And that was pretty much it.

One set-up that I particularly enjoyed was rediscovering an old setup that Tara, Christian, Dave, and the Fibbs used to use a lot in workouts called “Lost in a Tank”. Basically, you’re two people in the military in a tank, but you’re lost. Only in the auditions I set four people up in the scene. It was waaaay fun with four people.

Now I just have to decide who to call back. Fortunately we had a lot of really great people. Unfortunately we had a lot of really great people.

Rehearsal # The Last

One of the things that those few people who could be at rehearsal last week learned was “Dance so that you don’t get shot.” Meaning, pretend you have a big target on your chest and dance such that the audience never gets a good shot at it. To test that this week, Bryce brought in his vintage 1980’s Laser Tag set, but alas he did not bring enough batteries to run the gun so we couldn’t do it. Boo.

Instead we practiced singing rhythmic choruses that riff more on one note and split focus scenes. Puppets need to hardly move at all when they’re not the focus of a split scene because any movement draws the audiences attention away from who’s talking.

Christian brought up a good point he learned from watching a play in LA a few weeks ago. The company he saw perform is grounded in Comedia even though they don’t do Comedia, but generally speaking whoever is talking faces the audience and whoever isn’t talking faces the person talking. This is generally speaking a great rule to follow as a puppet.

We worked on finding the moment in a Bollywood scene when a song should happen, which is oddly different then song moments in Broadway, which I think I’ve touched on before.

Finally we worked on some larger group numbers and opening numbers.

Mostly though we just basked in the warm glow of our last rehearsal enjoying the last time we’d all be together at the same time.

Bollywood Clips

Clay has been busy posting video clips to Un-Scripted's YouTube Channel. Like this one, where part of the set comes crashing down at the end.



Or this opening number from the show on 12/6:

Week 3: Show Summaries

You may have noticed I didn't blog about last week's rehearsal. That's because less than an hour before it was to start we had to reschedule it for Wednesday due to a mishap with the space being double booked. Alas, I could not attend Wednesday, hence no blog. There is a rehearsal tonight however, so look for a blog about it later this week.

In the meantime, here's what happened last week:

Thursday: Used Car Desert or Road Trip to Love
The life of disillusioned used car salesman Raj (Pepper) changes forever when he sells a bum Miata to the young and beautiful Neesha (Jenny as puppet Evelyn). He quits the dealership and with the help of his best friend Ravi (Clay) fixes the Miata so that all three of them can escape the desert to the mountains! But soon Ravi becomes a jealous third wheel and the call of family threatens to end their fun adventures.

Friday: Look to the Stars or Love Returns... in Space!
Sanjeeb (Dave) falls in love with his boarding school headmaster’s crazy daughter Pooja (Christian as puppet Petal), but the headmaster, Rajeev (Jeff C.) won’t approve of the match because of Sanjeeb’s failing grades in Astronomy. Sanjeeb is expelled from the school and Pooja is locked in a tower, but when Sanjeeb returns to save her he is killed by Rajeev. Unable to live without her love, Pooja throws herself from the tower. Flash forward to a space station in the distant future. Will their reincarnated spirits finally be able to love in peace... in space?

Saturday: Armageddon Wars or Partners in Love
An asteroid is headed straight for a small neighborhood of Madras. An American Captain of a fishing boat, Rex Roger (Christian as puppet Stanley) must destroy it in order to win the love of the fair Reena (Christian as puppet Evelyn). The town scientists retrofit his fishing boat into a space ship and he launches into space. Little does he know that Reena and her entire family have dressed up as men and joined the crew. Will they get there in time?

Great Puppet Bollywood in the Blogosphere

Tim Bauer, cast member in last year's Great Puppet Musical, writes about seeing the show.

As does General Fuzz.

Un-Scripted Holiday Party

We had our 6th Annual Holiday Party and 5th Annual Yankee Swap yesterday. Clay posted pictures to a new Un-Scripted Flickr Photo Pool.

Week 2: Show Summaries

Thursday: The Late Train or Love on the Run
Reni (Jenny) is betrothed to the very large, very rich, and very mean Mr. Rashnish (Larry). She flees with the help of Amir (Clay as puppet Stanley) who has fallen madly in love with her. Pursued and hunted by Mr. Rashnish, all end up dead in a bloody sword battle… or do they?

Friday: H.M.S. Matrix or Art and Garbage
Shubhra (Mandy as puppet Nila), an artist at heart, goes in search of adventure with her faithful protector Rajesh (Alan), but find more than they bargained for when they’re captured and sold by a British slave ship. Will her father Samir (Bryce) save them in time, or will the long hidden love between Rajesh and Shubhra set them free?

Saturday Matinee: The Lost City of Snakes or Buried Desires
Brothers Sanjul (Alan as puppet Marcel) and Dr. Kamal Kamar (Dave) are excavating an ancient city near a small village. Soon ghosts start warning the terrified Sanjul to leave lest they awaken the hidden terror within, but Kamar refuses to stop exploring the site for the sake of scientific knowledge. It will take a lot of love and the help of the villagers to stop the evil unleashed.

Saturday Evening: Devil’s Tower or Do I Believe What I See?
Former Bollywood star Aisha (Mandy) has gone mad. From her mountaintop lair she kidnaps climbers and forces them to rehearse dance numbers with her daughter Pooja (Bryce as puppet Rita) whom she is grooming to fill her shoes. When simple watermelon farmers Salman (Jeff E.) and Rajul (Larry as puppet George) arrive as fans, Aisha turns Salman into Pooja’s co-star, but then Rajul and Pooja run off together. Aisha sends Salman, now corrupted by the glory of the spotlight, to kill Rajul. Will anyone escape Aisha's evil machinations?

Rehearsal #13 and Opening Weekend Thoughts

Yes, we rehearse even after the show opens. Why? Because once you get it up in front of an audience you can know… oh! That’s what this show is. That’s what we need to work on.

So what did we learn that we needed to work on?

We need to dance more. Hopefully a good way to accomplish that will be to do a better dance warm-up before the show itself, but we also worked a lot in rehearsal on the opening number. We have a set formation for the opening number. That’s about the only thing in the show that’s planned, except that even with the structure set up for the opening number, we still have no idea what we’re actually going to sing or dance.

We practiced the formation and the traffic patterns so that people can move around from place to place with in the formation without running into each other. In the heat of the moment in a show, it’s easy to forget where you’re supposed to go. So it’s good to practice.

We also spent a great deal of time practicing how to dance with scarves. Something that happens a lot, but that we really hadn’t worked at all. It’s very satisfying. Susan, who was in the audience Saturday night, pointed out to Mandy that if you’re performing as a puppeteer on a given night, you do not necessarily have to come out with a puppet to do background dancing. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. Especially if you want to work with scarves.

That leads me to a realization I had during the show Saturday night. In the last puppet show we did, and in this one, I would frequently find myself annoyed when a cast member who shall remain nameless, who was supposed to be a “person” on a given night, kept coming out as multiple puppet characters. Friday night, as a person myself, I discovered part way through the show that I was only playing one character, and for some reason found it difficult to come out as another one. We discovered during the Great Puppet Musical that it is indeed a challenge when playing a person to play multiple characters. Why? Because the puppets only every play one character. That trains the audience to make a 1-to-1 association between character and performer. Puppet X = 1 Character. Person Y = 1 Character.

To solve that problem, we had talked about coming out with a scarf or something to indicate that you are a different character than the other one you played. But Saturday night as I watched the person in question playing multiple puppet characters, it hit me. That’s the easiest way to play multiple characters as a person: grab a puppet. Wow, that will be useful.

We did not have a musician at rehearsal, but we practiced singing anyway. We worked on singing in more of rhythmic fashion as opposed to a melodic fashion. Singing melodies is a very western style of music. Hindi music often uses singing to mimic percussion instruments.

We also talked about changing the content and the placement of our songs. Songs in Bollywood musicals happen in different places than Broadway musicals. Bollywood musicals have a completely different narrative structure, which is taking some getting used to. We have trained ourselves very well not to add new information after the intermission or complicate the story at that point. Unfortunately in Bollywood the second half usually starts with some tragic incident. Trouble gets introduced then to reveal the consequences of the comic events of the first half. We find that so hard to do that Saturday night we introduced some trouble at the top of Act 2 and the immediately resolved it, leaving us struggling to make more trouble so the show wouldn’t end 15 minutes after intermission. That will be a major adjustment.

That also points out a limitation on the way we’re doing the show. .Because you’re average Bollywood movie lasts 4-5 hours, and we’re doing it in 2, we have to cut a lot out. We don’t have the same amount of time to develop storylines and characters that they do. That’s also how they get away with songs that don’t really reveal inner character emotions. The songs are very poppy and metaphorical because they have the time to develop the emotions in regular dialog. Broadway musicals use songs as a short cut to reveal those emotions without dialog.

It’s fascinating really.

Personally I think we should only do 1 show on Saturday December 20. Do the first 2 hours at 3 and then the second 2 hours at 8. It’ll be perfect.

Week 1: Show Summaries

Here's a sneak peek at last weekend's show summaries that will go out in tomorrow's email. We had a great weekend with packed houses. Make sure to buy your tickets early as we had to turn people away on Saturday night.

Friday: Naroosh’s Plum or Ambition!
Veeru (Bryce) returns home from the city to work for his family’s dung delivery service only to find he delivers more than just fertilizer to the fair Sarasvati (Jenny). He also delivers his heart. Can his ambition to win her hand be stopped? All he has to do is find the Plum of Naroosh... which probably doesn't even exit.

Ambition! - Sung by Bryce


Saturday Matinee: Love Train or Revenge Is Sweet!
Bashir (Pepper) and Rajul (Christian)have both fallen in love with Anita (Mandy) and pretend to be baggage handlers on a train to Bombay in order to be close to her as her family moves away from their village. When Bashir wins Anita’s affections, Rajul’s revenge takes a wrong turn, but that’s nothing a wedding on top of a moving train can’t fix!

Everything is New - Sung by Christian, Pepper, & Mandy


Saturday Evening: Raj’s Café or Everybody's Friend
Anuvab (Clay) just wants everybody to like him, but as a result he’s running his café into the ground. When his parents kick him out of the house, he’s forced to make the café profitable and becomes a tyrannical boss. Is the cost of success more than he’s willing to pay?

Everybody Likes! - Sung by Christian and Clay

Rehearsal #12: Final Dress!

Tuesday night we did a full-on dress rehearsal. Mandy chose a cast of 6 and everyone else watched. Things went very well. I have some work I need to do on the opening and closing. It’s been a long time since I ran a show’s opening and closing. I’ll get it, but it’s a good thing we did a dress rehearsal.

I also had an opportunity to play a villain, which is very satisfying. We haven’t done a show in a while where having a strong villain was appropriate. I’d forgotten how much fun it can be. I even had a chance to do some stage torture on a puppet. Basically I turned my back on the audience and grabbed the puppet, and Pepper made the puppet scream. The people in the audience said they all imagined I was doing some Reservoir Dogs ear cutting or something. The audience’s imagination is far more gruesome and graphic than anything you can actually do on stage.

Pepper has a great attitude that you almost have to have if you’re going to succeed as an improvisor. The best way I can describe it is “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m gonna do it anyway” and then you do it with joy and enthusiasm. I’ve come to really look for those moments and dive into them. They happen sometimes for me at the beginning of musicals. One actually happened at the beginning of the dress rehearsal. We’d all gone off-stage and someone needed to go out and set the chorus for the opening song. But no one was moving. And it got to that moment where too much time had passed and someone just needed to go out there. So even though I didn’t have anything, I went out there and just trusted that I would come up with something. And I did.

That’s really what it’s all about: trusting yourself enough to go out there with nothing and knowing that you’ll come up with something. It’s improv after all. You can’t say the wrong thing.

One of the other things that came during notes was learning how to inhabit a character and do the things your character would do, while still having the detachment to watch the show as an improvisor. Oftentimes your character wants to do this, but the story wants you to do that. You need to be able to see those things and chose the one that’s best for the show. Jeff E was the protagonist in the show and in a few parts he made choices based on what his character would logically want. But as the protagonist, the audience needed to see him be effected by what was happening, so even though his character would probably want to keep a brave face, the story needed him to show his emotions.

But being able to separate what your character wants from what the show wants is just as important for side-characters. After all, a side-character doesn’t know the show isn’t about them, but the improvisor needs to know that or they risk stealing focus and derailing the show.

"The Set Is So Pretty"

We loaded in for the show last night. The set turned out really beautiful. Mandy just kept walking around at the end saying "the set is so pretty!!"

Here are photos:

Rehearsal #11: Group Mind and Dance

We had rehearsal Wednesday night at the movement studio space at ACT. If you haven’t rehearsed at ACT in a while, they’ve completely re-done the 8th floor. It’s very disorienting if you’re used to the old lay-out.

We started by working on group mind characters. That’s when a group of characters (a group being as small as 2) share a group mind. They may not say exactly the same thing or even have exactly the same personalities, but they are essentially the same character. They have the same opinions and reactions. When you have a lot of characters on stage at the same time, it’s generally useful to gravitate into group minds. It generally keeps scenes from devolving into chaos as everyone tries to get in their ideas. Group minds can also be very fluid. One moment you might be in a group mind with characters A and B and then be an individual in the next moment. As with anything, there are no hard and fast rules.

But it’s a useful skill, recognizing when group mind characters are needed and knowing how to do them.

They often take the form of Character A and their group of followers who are all of a group mind. That’s what we practiced as it’s fairly common in Bollywood (and most stories really); you see Male love interest and his friends (of group mind) and Female love interest and her friends (of group mind).

For some reason, whenever we work on group mind characters, I feel compelled to mention that we at Un-Scripted first started working on group mind when founding member Brian McBride noticed that the cheerleader in Better Off Dead dates the entire basketball team and how the basketball team functions as one character.

But that’s not all we did. As we were in the movement studio, we also worked a lot on dancing. We would start a scene and then Mandy would play a Bollywood song off a CD (as we were sans musician) and we’d dance to it. Because we weren’t also trying to invent lyrics to the song as we went, we found we did much more interesting and fun dance numbers this way.

That got us to thinking, that generally when a song moment hits, we sing and maybe fit some dance in if we can. For this show, we need to think of them as music moments, not song moments, and remember that we can also just start dancing and throw some singing in if we can.

Rehearsal #10: Good, Bad, & Ugly

Last weekend, Mandy watched an obscene amount of Bollywood movies and remembered several things about Bollywood that she had forgotten. One such nugget of knowledge involved the general tonal convention of Bollywood comedies. The first half focuses on the hilariously comic and funny situations. Then there’s an intermission. Then something horrible happens as a result of the comic antics in the first half, and everyone cries a lot. Then everything works out in the end.

So we practiced that. We did a scene where we focused on hilarious comic situations. Then we did another scene from the later in the story after something had gone horribly wrong involving lots of histrionics and weeping.

Bollywood films have a great deal of embedded melodrama, but in our brief little scenes we discovered we were taking things a bit too far. The point is to play the serious consequences with truth and real emotion. Ok, perhaps the point is to dial them up a notch higher than real, but the truer they are, the richer the emotional journey of the characters and the audience.

We also revisited a disturbing (dare I say “ugly”) fact about working with puppets: Puppets, unlike humans, can die on stage. When an actor lies on the ground and plays dead, even from the back row you can still see them breathing if you look close enough. Or maybe they move slightly. In any case, they are unmistakably alive.

When a puppet, removed from the hand of its puppeteer, is placed on the stage, they look truly dead. Because they are. The can’t get up. They can’t move on their own. They can’t talk. They are dead, in a disturbingly real way.

Play Schedule

Here's the play schedule for the show. As always, there may be last minute substitutions, but this is a fairly accurate picture of who will be performing when.

Friday, November 28th:
Alan, Bryce, Clay, Jenny, Larry, Pepper
Musician: Daniel Walling

Saturday, November 29th Matinee:
Bryce, Christian, Jeff C, Mandy, Pepper
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday, November 29th Evening:
Alan, Christian, Clay, Jeff C, Jeff E, Jenny
Musician: Daniel Walling

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Thursday, December 4th:
Christian, Clay, Dave, Jeff E, Jenny, Larry
Musician: David Norfleet

Friday, December 5th:
Alan, Bryce, Jeff C, Jeff E, Mandy
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday, December 6th Matinee:
Alan, Bryce, Dave, Pepper, Jeff C, Jenny
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday, December 6th Evening:
Alan, Bryce, Jeff E, Larry, Mandy, Pepper
Musician: David Norfleet

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Thursday, December 11th:
Clay, Dave, Jeff C, Jenny, Mandy, Pepper
Musician: David Norfleet

Friday, December 12th:
Dave, Christian, Bryce, Larry, Jeff C, Jeff E
Musician: We need one. You know one? Email me.

Saturday, December 13th Matinee:
Alan, Christian, Jenny, Larry, Mandy, Pepper
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday December 13th Evening:
NO SHOW

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Thursday, December 18th:
Bryce, Christian, Dave, Jeff C, Jenny, Pepper
Musician: David Norfleet

Friday, December 19th:
Alan, Clay, Jeff C, Jeff E, Larry, Mandy
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday, December 20th Matinee:
Christian, Clay, Dave, Jeff E, Jenny, Larry
Musician: David Norfleet

Saturday, December 20th Evening:
Alan, Bryce, Christian, Clay, Dave, Mandy
Musician: We need one. You know one? Email me.

Rehearsal #9: Improv in Union Square

Photo from Alamedainfo.com

Oftentimes I go to the gym before rehearsal. I get off work around 5. Rehearsal doesn’t start until 7. I have some time to kill and a good workout usually does the trick. Tuesday, however, I was feeling a bit under the weather. I’ve been fighting a head cold pretty much since last week’s rehearsals. So instead of going to the gym, I dawdled at work and then headed over to the theater, arriving about an hour early.

Only to find people holding auditions in the space. Due to a scheduling oversight, someone else was in fact booked in the space until 8pm. A mad dash ensued to attempt to secure another venue. Unfortunately every other theater in the building was booked. As 7 o’clock arrived, with the cast gathered in the first floor hallway, Mandy decided we should all go to Union Square to warm up for a little while and then return to the theatre at 8pm to continue rehearsal.

So that’s what we did. Fortunately Union Square wasn’t that crowded and we didn’t get kicked out by security. We found a nice little corner under an awning near the Half Price Tix booth and played some warm-up games: The Addams Family (invented by Larry and similar to the Dukes of Hazard game we’d played earlier) and I Am a Tree.

When we returned to the theater did a more formal dance and vocal warm-up (David Norfleet was at rehearsal to play music), and then we dove into two short practice long-forms.

I was in the first and in the very first scene, much to my surprise, effortlessly found myself in the role of the protagonist. Frequent readers know that I am a master of deflecting the protagonist role onto someone else and often struggle with becoming the protagonist even if I want to be. But in that first scene I latched on to it right way without even trying. What made that all the more remarkable was that I was playing opposite Christian in that scene. As I am the master of deflecting the protagonist role (even unconsciously), he is the master of becoming the protagonist (even unconsciously). It was like we reversed roles or something. It was amazing.

I also had no fear at all going into my opening protagonist song. Also something quite new for me, given my historic issues around singing. Those seem to be a thing of the past. I mean, I don’t want to get cocky, and I know I can greatly improve my singing, but at least I’m not terrified of it anymore.

The second long-form included one of the most hysterically funny, and just plain wrong, songs I’ve ever seen improvised. The story involved two competing two companies. A large one that made violent war toys, and a small family company that made peaceful toys. Then came an almost innocent romantic song between a very young puppet character and an inappropriately aged suitor about the peaceful toys of love she was selling. You know, her “love toys”.

If only Clay had been there with his iPhone.