Well that's what we call a roller-coaster show! The good stuff was some of the best we've ever done, and the other scenes were poor for various flaws in our techniques. So goes improv... if it was scripted, we could always guarantee the outcome. We can't and that's why it's so fun.

A quick note that the new game "A Call From Ray" was played a bit wrong on our part, so it didn't translate well. Our bad.

The good stuff though was fantastic. The "exclusion" scene was a lot of fun with Phil in the cockfighting costume, and Cody and my scene in "Choose Your Own Adventure" with the end of the world was top notch, thanks to some great directions given by Willem and Ben. Also the 3rd Space Jump entry where Cody re-introduced the Iran/Iraq war where I now had America (Phil) on my side. Pretty clever multi-layered stuff in that one.

The  new game we played called "Bong Bong Bong" turned out real well. This was the game where one person got the suggestion of 'would you like fries with that', and by the end of all 3 of us miming and gibberish talking we had various interpretations that ranged from "teach a man to fish..." to "You and me goin' fishin' in the dark" to Phil's comment, something about "a fish playing BINGO". This will be played again.

The high quality stuff truly made this show worthwhile for those who came out.

Breaking the mold, we tried performing to completely different styles of entertainment in one night. Since it was my band, and I was in the improv show as well, I thought I'd post a thank you to those who stuck around for the experiment.

My opinion, well first thing, it took more energy than I thought it would. Mentally, I also don't think it was a good decison, as my brain overloaded with pre-show preparations for both events, and the skill sets needed to be used are drawn from different areas, so that also weighed me down.

It was worth trying out, but unless we get to the point where we can pay a crew to set up all the equipment, and do all the other legwork associated with that scale of a production, it won't be happening again.

I had a lot of fun, and again, thanks to everyone for coming out and checking it out. It raised the bar again as far as attendance was concerned. If the numbers we've been seeing keep going up, we'll actually have to turn people away at the door. We'll see you next week for WAR! It should be far less stressful...

Well, we had a smaller house than usual (But last year we would have thought it was packed).

It was a great show, with lots of good material and good content. We apologize to those who came at 11pm, since the show started at 9, and we failed to get the info to the newspapers in time.

This blog I think I'll just quickly break down the game of Good Cop/Bad Cop we played where Willem was guilty of being Adolf Hitler, who stole shoelaces inside the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles secret lair.

The trick to this game is not giving away the elements too early. Willem had been sent out of the room, and had no idea of his crimes. Phil and I interrogated him with increasingly more obvious hints. It's important to not only use verbal hints, but body language as cues as well. Ironically it wasn't my Nazi salute that tipped Willem off, but Phil's straight lagged pacing and some funny little mustache comments that finally clued him in.

The stolen shoelaces was pretty quick, and most surprisingly of all he accidentally guessed we were in a lair (thinking of Hitler's underground bunker) but it matched up to the Ninja Turtles suggestion. That's another great trait of these kind of games. Sometimes when the actor just guesses boldly, they end up getting it right out of total blind luck.

It created a great, unexpected moment.

Well, our biggest house yet saw a solid effort across the board. Our point to writing this blog is so that anyone visiting our website will maybe learn a bit more about what we do, and the tricks of the trade. We also want to catalogue our scenes because they're fun to reminisce on, and this will give us archives to go back on.

Last night, personally I had the most fun doing the Emotional Styles scene with Brice, the Human Prop Penalty (Phil) with Cody, the Bowling Scene with Brice and Cody, and the Oil Rigs Silent Replay with Phil.

I think the scene I'll give some insight into will be the Dating Game. It may be interesting for people to understand the mechanics, and how important it is to have a skilled improviser as the person looking for a date.

Jenny did a wonderful job leading Phil (Spongebob Squarepants), Brice (a maggot) and Max (Napoleon) with the perfectly worded, open ended questions. The whole trick to this game is for us to get Jenny to guess what we are without giving it away too obviously. It's not always easy to do, but I think everyone should know the 3 guys giving the hints get all the laughs usually, but the most important person is the one guessing.

The questions asked let us use whatever ideas we have and frame them as a hint. For those who saw this scene last night, it was played cleverly by all involved, and was a nice example of proper improv skill sets.

Max