Monday, August 20, 2007

150 sketches in 3 months, 2 stages in 2 months

We’ve taken tally of all the greenlit material for The Wasteland Comedy Hour, and the verdict is, we have 3 months to produce 88 film sketches.  In addition, we have 2 months to rehearse around 60 stage sketches.  Oh, and there are about 10 musical numbers to record and/or rehearse.  Did we bite off more than we could chew?  Yes, most definitely.  Are we still going to swallow?  Mmmm-hmmnph.

Most of the sketches are very short and light on production value, but there are some epics in each show that require real locations, costumes, props, and effects if the film is going to be properly served by our efforts.  We’re hoping to knock out 4-5 sketches per evening, and another 5-6 over weekends—but as we know, filming always runs long, even with the most generous of compromises.

Most of the stage bits are self-explanatory, but will require rehearsal to hit the beats right.  Because each sketch is so different, each needs its own TLC, and we have to be sensitive to both the needs of the show as a whole, and how each bit breathes.  Again, most of these are short bits, 2 minutes or under. The music is also moving into production, so that our handful of musical wizards can work their sinister alchemies on our material.  The mysteries of this process will be revealed to me in a month or so, when we have actual pieces of music with which to work, not just clever lyrics in a Word document.

In an effort to make this project more open-source, I’m going to share with you—the ten readers of my blog—the master spreadsheet that our director, Jason Haas, and our Production Manager, Lynn Wilcott, created this weekend. They took account of the following data:

• Cast availability
• Location availability
• Location overlaps
• Estimated production value, abstracted into cost in “resources” (time/money/cast/postproduction)
• Priority of producing material, based on the order of our shows

He also color-coded the material to give us an idea of which sketches are the “epics” in terms of our resources.  Pink is hellish, yellow is standard, green is easy.  Oh, and in this context, gentle reader, the names of the sketches function as teasers, not spoilers:

Goodbye, Autumn Weekends!

In short, the wheels are in motion, and in a few short weeks I’ll be holed up with Adobe Premiere, cutting hours upon hours of footage into little comedy gems.

Speaking of wheels in motion, there’s major news at our home theater, ImprovBoston.  ImprovBoston is opening a new theater in Central Square, Cambridge.  This is huge, exciting news for our little improv community, and—in time—it’ll be huge for Boston comedy.  The new space will have 2 stages (mainstage and cabaret), it’s actually T-accessible, there’s probably going to be a bar, and just about everything about this new space is new and exciting.  It’ll be right next to The Field, where an old Asian market used to be.

When will it open, you say?  The plan right now is to build the whole goddamn thing by the opening of Gorefest, which means Halloween weekend.  Now, I’ve never heard of any construction, big or small, happening according to schedule, but I’m biting my tongue and crossing my fingers.  The people slaving behind the scenes to make this new theater a reality are very dedicated, and it sounds like there’s a time-sensitive need to move out of the current theater in Inman Square.

So—if ImprovBoston can build a new theater in 2 months, I think we can produce 150 sketches in 3 months.  The bar is high, but nothing rewarding is easy.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Themes & Outlines

We had a big Wasteland meeting last night, in which the producers unveiled the seven outlines for the seven shows we’ll be putting up in November/December.  The seven organizing principals have held up well, and will indeed be the 7 shows we produce.

A hell of a lot of time was spent parsing through two months’ worth of material, then organizing it by theme, then scraping and molding it to feel cohesive.  We still have a lot of work to do, but the show outlines look very exciting.  I think we’ve managed to write about 6.5 hours, and the remainder will come together by the end of August.  We’ve got films, experimental videos, stage sketches, fake video games, musical numbers, audience-interactive bits, and jokes to produce, rehearse, and polish.  There’s not nearly enough room in our schedules to do it all, but luckily the producers have the power to bend space-time.  All my other projects take a back-seat until Christmas.

My personal challenge in the next two weeks is to rewrite a series of sketches for the War/Aggression show, tentatively titled “My Thing Is Bigger.”  I’d written a fun running bit about a unicorn terrorist attack and the media’s exploitation of the event, which would periodically interrupt T.S. Eliot’s late-night program.  (We’ve begun referring to these running motifs as superstructures, to differentiate them from the 3-act structure we’ve built around Eliot’s show-within-a-show.)  After discussing this episode with Tucker and Haas, we decided we were missing an opportunity to actually discuss issues surrounding the Iraq War, the fictitious “War on Terror,” and the trouble we Americans have dissecting the conflict.  The unicorn runner, fanciful as it is, is going to be reworked to be a little heavier, a little more palpably linked to the global events of the last six years.

The difficulty, of course, is actually writing a series of scenes about the Iraq War, without undue levity or condescending heavy-handedness, starring a bunch of fucking unicorns.  The point is not to engage in discourse about the war, but to pull our comedy from the aspects of the war that are most real, most difficult.  I think our team can pull it off, so long as we use these:

Monday, July 30, 2007

DCM Postmortisserie

UCB Theater, 9:30pm Friday night. The lights go up, I walk on stage for the first time, and half of the audience boos.  That’s when I know it’s going to be a good show.

Code Duello
They weren’t booing me, of course, but Mr. Aaron Burr. It’s happened a few times, now, where the audience chooses their side before the show even begins. This is facilitated in part by our show opener—a brief narration refreshing the audience on their post-colonial American history—when the narrator intones the name Aaaron Burrrrr in “spooky-voice,” as if our silly improv play is being told over s’mores by an aging camp counselor.  At this year’s DCM, Aaron Burr was a villain before he even opened his mouth, and that served as a nice little roadmap for the show—hopefully I gave the audience who they wanted, a lovably despicable Vice Presidential man-child.  And Mr. Hamilton turned out to be a pithy cockney lad masquerading as the ex-Secretary of Treasury.

At the DCM you only have 30 minutes before you’re blacked out, and they run a really tight ship, so there’s no leeway. This is a challenge for our show, which has a definite end point we must reach by the 30-minute mark; if Hamilton isn’t dead when the lights go out, we’ve broken our promise to the audience, and god judges broken promises pretty harshly.  Matt kept a better eye on the time than I did, and thank god—he died with 1 second left on the clock. We didn’t get to see the brief aftermath, but at that point the show was so silly it was best to end on another childish tiff (as to whether or not he was truly dying). Cheers and thanks to the UCB’s tech crew, who executed our show flawlessly.

Boston & the DCM
Bostonians made a healthy showing at this year’s marathon. I was able to get my butt in the audience for both Bastards Inc. and Uniprov‘s sets.  I wasn’t able to attend Backstory or Dream Show or This Is Pathetic, but when the topic of Boston improv came up backstage (as it inevitably did), I spread the word about our traveling troubadours. (If you have a recap for a show I missed, post it in the comments!)

Matt Walsh and other UCBers asked me if there’s a big scene in Boston.  My response was, there’s a growing scene.  This seemed to be the consensus amongst non-Bostonians familiar with ImprovBoston and Improv Asylum.  In talking to UCBers and improvisers from around the country, I’ve come to realize that Boston has a reputation for producing theme-heavy shows.  Waiting for Ennis Cotter, Code Duello, Backstory, Uniprov, Dream Show, The Robert Cycle... these shows all have a “hook” because that’s how we draw audiences in Boston, where the interest in improv from non-improvisers is pretty low.  Although shows like Ennis Cotter and Code Duello have traveled well and been well-received, I find the general sentiment in Chicago and New York is, “why would good improv need a hook?”  In New York, Chicago, and LA, good Harold teams are consistently able to entertain audiences without costumes, highbrow themes, crazy structures, consistent characters—the very things that define a “showcase” show in the Boston scene.  At the DCM this year, most of the shows with “hooks” were one-off jokey shows, highly entertaining but ultimately just opportunities for the veterans to fuck around on stage.

It’s a shame that more Bostonians don’t regularly see shows at festivals, particularly the shining gems at the Del Close Marathon.  I remember my mind being blown three years ago by Scheer-McBrayer, Respecto, The Beatbox (from DSI), and Mother.  Two years ago I added The Stepfathers to my list of must-see shows.  This year I wasn’t able to see nearly as much of the veterans as I’d like, but I was delighted by the depression-era antics of The Sunshine Gang, and Chuckle Sandwich was hilarious. 

Anyway, the point is that there are people in our generation doing stage-work that is smarter, faster, funnier, more believable, more organic, and more supportive/supported than anything happening in Boston.  It’s not a matter of personal taste, or of “different styles,” or of a larger pool of talent.  They are simply better ensembles. They work better together. Why?  Training, drive, and practice, I’m guessing—emphasis on the latter two.  At first it’s a bitter pill for Bostonians to swallow, but I have never walked away from a festival intimidated or down-on-Boston.  I always walk away inspired.  The kind of improv that we want to be doing is attainable, and it’s being done by people our age, in commuting distance, in places that we can watch.  The Boston scene is growing, yes, but how much faster would it grow if everybody were inspired by the superior work being done on the national stage?

Backstage @ the UCB
Last year I was super fucking scared of being at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. In retrospect, I feel almost lucky that I was able to pull a good performance out of my jangled mess of nerves. This year I was way, way more relaxed, and consequently was able to enjoy some time backstage, afloat in the sea of free beer, improvisers, improv groupies, and improv celebrities.

I don’t know if it’s my uninformed outsider’s opinion, but there seems to be a fair amount of incest and idol-worship amongst the UCB community.  Boston may be insular, but we don’t have any heroes.  I’ve always been astounded at those moments when you realize that 3/4 of the audience knows every performer on stage by name.  It may be a result of UCB alumni actually being successful in the entertainment world at large.  Let’s face it—those of us who do improv want to have the careers of the famous improv alumni, be they from Second City or the UCB.  But idol worship?  Improv groupies?  I thought I was immune.

And then, I found myself conversing with a few of those people who I want to be.  Whose careers I envy, whose talents I respect, whose genuinely nice personalities seem unaffected by their success in television.  I fell into fanboy mode, covertly drooling after pleasant interactions with writer/performers from The Daily Show, The Office, 30 Rock, and… oh, fuck it, I’m a groupie.  I want to push these men into a dark corner backstage, demand they tell me all their secrets, then kiss them heterosexually.

The icing on the cake is that Code Duello seems to be building a great reputation, both amongst general audiences and improvisers.  Having somebody compliment Matt and I on a great show is awesome, but having somebody tell us they heard we had great shows and were really sorry they missed us… that’s a completely unnecessary (but delicious) courtesy!  And it seems like our audience has a few more returning members with each performance, another wonderful silent compliment.  I feel like I’m able to network, remember names and faces, and generally put myself out into the larger improv community better than I was able to a year ago.

DCM ‘08
Obviously I had a great weekend, and I must thank the DCM selection staff again for giving Matt and I the opportunity to play in the festival.  Next year, Boston, send your best. And until then—fucking see some shows in New York.  If you need direction, I have more raving recommendations than you can handle.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Del Close Marathon

If you’re in New York this weekend, and you don’t hate comedy, you should drop in for the 9th Annual Del Close Marathon.  3 stages, 72 hours, all-improv all the time.  Celebrity improvisers mix with unknowns, polished and long-running shows go back-to-back with one-off experimental performances, and you both meet people and ignore strangers.

I’ll be playing in Code Duello on Friday night, 9:30pm, in the Upright Citizens Brigade theater.  Bastards Inc. has a set at 1am that night (Sat. morning).  Best get in line earlier if you want to catch the show; once the theater fills to capacity, you have to wait until people exit in order to get in.  It’ll be sweaty, claustrophobic, and hilarious.