Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Live at the Improv

Improvisation is definitely one of the things I love most about life on earth. Jazz improv is just about the most amazing thing ever conceived. My favorite movies are the Christopher Guest mocumentaries like "Waiting for Guffman" and "This Is Spinal Tap", which have very little in terms of scripts and plot directions. Life is an improvisational experience, if you ask me. So I ran into my friend Bekka Eaton at the grocery store on Sunday night. Bekka is a wonderful actor/musician/director - formerly with of The Second City troupe, The Daves, and film/TV work, and now back home in Fairfield and Assistant Professor of Theater at Miami Hamilton. She asked me to do the Paul Shaffer piano thing (sorry, I'm not shaving my head) for an improv show she is directing/producing next weekend. So I spent this evening with her troupe of college and community folks figuring out how to plan for improv -kind of an oxymoron if you ask me. We had lots of laughts together and I think it's going to be great fun. If you like "Whose Line Is It Anyway", you should enjoy this evening. Who knows, even Big Red might show up.

The show is entitled "Improv-Ing Our Lives" and will be in the Studio Theater (Phelps room 307 - same building where the most excellend Parrish Auditorium is located) April 13, 14, and 15 at 7:30PM. Details are here, except the link erroneously says two nights only - trust me, it's all three nights.

2 comments:

David Blakeslee said...

Hi Chuck. I just want to let you know that I replied to your comment on evolution/creation over on my blog and to say I like what you've done with your site already. You actually use the same template that I did up until this past January, so it's kind of pleasant to see that look again. I will be a frequent visitor I think since you write about stuff that interests me.

And I'll also toss in a plug for "A Mighty Wind" since you mentioned Christopher Guest movies...

Chuck said...

Thanks for the visit, Dave. I like pretty much everything that Christopher Guest has done - Guffman and Spinal Tap are my favorites probably because I can most strongly associate people I know with the characters :-)

My wife, Deb, and I were in NYC last April and came within 20 people of getting to see Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Bob Baliban, and Parker Posey in a night of comedy and music at the Museum of Modern Art. If we had only gotten up 30 minutes earlier...