If you're in the Los Angeles area and are free this Saturday night, I have a recommendation for you. This is for the cheapest, best thing you can possibly do in this city on a Saturday evening short of staying home and reading this blog…
Back in the eighties, I got involved (kinda) with a project that some friends were doing. It was called Instaplay and every Saturday evening for a few years, I tried to attend and help out. Instaplay was improv in its purest form. A batch of skilled improv comedy performers would convene and invent on the spot an entire musical comedy (songs, included) based on a title suggested by someone in the audience. There are other troupes that do that now, some of them very well…but at the time it was unique and revolutionary.
So every week it was different…and I won't say they batted a thousand but every one was worth attending and an amazing percentage were sensational. I dragged friends there and they, in turn, dragged other friends…and so on and so on. What they saw was Real Improv…and let me explain what I mean.
There's improv comedy and there's improv comedy. A lot of it works like this: You're on stage. You find yourself in a scene about ocelots. Your mind races back to that sketch you did once about grasshoppers and your improvising thereafter consists of doing as much of that bit as you can, switching the grasshoppers to ocelots. If you do a lot of alleged improv, you develop a whole repertoire of routines that can be easily adapted. Sometimes, it's like an on-your-feet version of Mad-Libs, inserting the new name into the old scenario. You also learn a lot of stalling tactics to give yourself time to think ahead.
That's still technically improv but there's a better, purer kind. For that kind, you work "in the moment" and really do say it as you think of it and vice-versa. Instaplay is that kind.
Helming all Instaplays was a friend o' mine named Bill Steinkellner, who's widely hailed as one of the best teachers of improv comedy in the business. He's been responsible for a lot of careers and had a dandy one of his own. Before long, Bill and his brilliant wife Cheri (a key Instaplayer) were busy writing TV shows including The Jeffersons and Cheers, plus unimprovised musicals like Sister Act. Most of the other Instaplayers began working extensively in TV, some in front of and some behind the camera. Eventually, everyone was too busy/successful to take Saturday nights out to Instaplay and the shows ceased.
A few years back, Bill began teaching a Master Class in improv comedy — the kind of thing where skilled performers go to work out and practice. That led to someone saying, "Hey, for old time's sake, let's do another Instaplay." They did one and it went so well, they did another…and another and another. But they're running out of "anothers" so this coming Saturday evening, they're doing the last one for a while. The troupe will include Cheri Steinkellner, Jonathan Stark, Deanna Oliver, George McGrath and Navaris Darson, with Bill onstage directing things to the extent they can be directed.
As I write this, there are tickets available but not many of them. That's because the theater is tiny. It's also really crummy but we don't care as long as the performances are, as I'm sure they will be, brilliant. Also, the tickets are, like I said, ridiculously cheap. I'll be there and I thought you might wanna be.
BTW: The little hunk of ad above was adapted from an ad I designed back around, I'm guessing, 1983. I had laid it all out and put in the lettering and I was just about to start drawing silly people when my doorbell rang. It was Sergio Aragonés and I thought to myself, "Aha! Better artist!" Sergio wanted to go to lunch. I said, "Sure. But I have to change my clothes and while I do, finish this drawing for me!" Sure enough, by the time I'd changed, the whole thing — it was much larger than the piece you see here — was done and we went to lunch. It was more appropriate that he draw it since Instaplay requires an Instacartoonist.