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April 05, 2002
Chicago Improv Festival Showcase
"A Retirement Party"
We were up at the CIF on the "Showcase" stage on Friday at 10:30, sandwiched between The Knock Your Socks Off Players (Salt Lake City) and The Impatients (Toronto, Canada). Shaun and I had just performed with The Impatients in Orlando, so it was nice to be doing a show with them again.
The Showcase stage was upstairs at the Athenaeum, so I went downstairs and caught Noble Fool and Annoyance on the Main Stage at 8 before I started my pre-show "where is everybody?, can we warm up?, what's going on?" jitters. Adding, a little, to the jitters was the fact that Armando was in town and would be seeing the show for the first time.
When we were doing the run, we had people write down their suggestions on slips of paper before the show, so that Greg could quickly scan them and toss out any crazy ones. (Is that cheating? I don't care -- I'll cheat if that's what it takes to put on a good show. Anyway, this cast would have still improvised if I'd handed them a script, so I'm not really worried about the artistic implications of slightly restricting the randomness of the suggestion.) We hadn't gotten organized to do that at this show, so I put Armando on the spot at the top of our set to give us a suggestion. "A Retirement Party."
The show turned out... pretty good, I think. Not our most-bestest show ever (we rushed a little since we only had 30 minutes) but a good representation of what the cast could do.
And... that's it. We don't have any plans to ever do this show again, ever. I think Armando is working on remounting it in New York (where he had originally produced it). But for us it's...
The End
Posted by Fuzzy at April 5, 2002 08:00 PM