The First Improv Show You Ever Saw

[vine311]

I used to perform in solo and group improv for UIL competitions in high school. Things were a lot different back then. They would hand you a slip of paper with your "suggestion" on it and send you out in the hall for 5 minutes to come up with your "skit". I still have a 2nd place group improv trophy from 1992. It's now one of my most prized possessions.

The first live improv show I saw was a Maestro either in late 2005 or early 2006. I had read an article about the show in the Chronicle and thought "Hey, I used to do improv, this will be fun!" So, I took my date to the show and volunteered for a game of Twin Pillars and was immediately hooked. Andy was directing that night and mentioned that classes were starting the following Monday. I signed up for classes and haven't looked back since. I remember being particularly impressed with Roy, Kareem and Erika May that night. I ended up running into Kareem and Roy at a White Ghost Shivers show a few days later and actually felt kinda starstruck.

[Spaztique]

Winter of 2006, I saw Parallelogramophonograph's "After School Special" at Coldtowne Theatre after hearing about it from Wesley from the Tuesday Night Jam, and I gave the suggestion of teen pregnancy for the show. Get Up was also there, doing a sea epic.

And the rest is history.

[Aden]

The first improv show I saw was one I produced and directed in High School in February of 1995. Improv was so much a part of my theatrical training (which started at the age of 6), that I wanted to dedicate my senior project work to it. I even wrote my senior thesis on the use of improv as a teaching tool... and went on to teach improv for a couple of years.

The show I created was called Random Things. It was a mix of monologue, scripted sketch, improvised dialogue inside of already blocked scenes, and included two mini-episodes of a fully improvised soap opera. It was two acts of roughly 45 minutes and had a fifteen minute intermission. The show ran for two weekends and each night was completely different. My parents have one of the nights on video somewhere.

In comparison the improv I see and participate in here in Austin is sooooo much simpler!

[Marc Majcher]

I'm pretty sure the first improv show I saw was in New York around 1996 or so. My friend from college Tim was in a group called Newman's Nose (or something close to that), and got us to come out a show. I think they were doing some kind of TheaterSports type of format, maybe not exactly that, but definitely some team-based competitive short form thing. It was pretty funny, and I was (at the time) impressed that my buddy Tim's team won the world championship of improv or whatever they called it back then, without realizing it was just the thing for the show they were doing. I'm pretty sure that I kept getting flyers and kept not going back, though.

(The interesting part of that story is that Asaf was in one or more troupes with Tim around then, so I probably saw him in there, and talked to him at a party or something after. Shortly after arriving in Austin, Asaf brought me some photos that he took at a juggling club thing, and there I was. Crazy.)

The first improv that I saw in Austin (and I don't think I'd seen any in between, aside from zapping through Whose Line on the teevee a couple times) was a show that Les McGeehee put together for the Alamo in 2003 or so. I'd been doing roller derby stuff a bunch in the years around then, and Les was emceeing the matches, and got a bunch of us to go to his show. It was mostly short formy stuff, with Les and Cynthia Oelkers and Scott Chester and... someone else. Again, funny, but didn't go to see it more than once.

Then I ran into the Hideout, and classes, and blah blah blah. And in the end, improv won.

[Scratch]

Well, damn, pull me out from my retreat here why dontcha. Been just lurking silently lately but this blew it...

The Proposition in Cambridge, MA, sometime between 1975 and 1978. I was a little hippie freak child, avoiding school and going hither and yon in the greater Boston area to odd theater, jazz clubs, Passims folk club, only now slapping my head and realizing "d'oh! That was, like, history, man, if you had a sharper memory!" I don't remember who I went with, or what year exactly, or who was performing, or what the scenes were about. Because I was only, like, 16 or 17 or 18 and it was KIND OF A LONG TIME AGO. I know I thought they were funny...

But what I do remember, vividly, is that whenever it was, it was during an Equine Encephalitis health scare (so it must have been summer because that was transmitted by mosquitoes). Right before intermission, four of the cast members came out and sang a song that I can still remember the tune to:
"Equine Encephalitis is a serious condition,
So please don't horse around during intermission"

That was how they announced that it was time for intermission and I remember thinking that was so clever how they had worked up that special little song for intermission and I sang it a lot after that and it wasn't until, like, 25 years later than I realized that song had probably been improvised, too.

[hujhax]

The first live improv I saw was at Second City in Chicago, I think in late 1997.  Various friends at the show told me I should try doing improv myself sometime.  I ignored that advice.

As for the first show I saw in Austin, lessee...

*thumbs through old correspondence*

I moved to Austin in April of 2000.  A month later, I got pulled over for running a stop sign.  A month after that, I went to comedy defensive driving at Northcross Mall, where they gave me a free ticket to one of their improv shows.  So that would have been the second improv show I ever saw.  I honestly don't remember much about that show, apart from the fact that Dav Wallace was in the cast (w00t!).  I went on to check out a bunch of shows at the Hideout (after looking around online for improv shows in Austin) after that.



--
peter rogers @ work | http://hujhax.livejournal.com

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring.  We must never, ever be boring.
      -- Chuck Palahniuk

[DollarBill]

I went to the ring in the midnight show at the hideout and saw the two Kacies, Kareem and another guy (can't remember his name) with Roy directing.

IT WAS ME! The other guy was me! That was super fun, and I can't thank those folks enough for letting me play with them that night.

Apart from the improv we did in theater in middle school and high school in class and at competition...
WELL HUNG JURY! At the Hideout. Must have been February or March of 2000. I think it was "the messy show", but I also remember them doing a format in which they improvised a movie preview with tiny clips from a movie, and based on that they improvised the movie and you would see the clips from the movie come back and appear in their entirety.
I remember thinking "Wow. I could see the set and the costumes in my head! Nobody is going to understand this when I tell them what I saw. How could you make that up?"
I was right. In all the years since that I've spent telling the uninitiated about improv, not one has understood it.
I became a member of Well Hung Jury by April of that year.

Look at me now! I'm "another guy" who performs with "the two Kacies".

[vine311]

Look at me now! I'm "another guy" who performs with "the two Kacies".

That was my only improv dream and now it has come true for me too. We should start a club, Bill.

[SarahMarie]

With regards to Whose Line is it Anyway, which I saw as a child, I would say the first time I became aware of improvisation as an actual, doable, watchable art form was FronteraFest 2008. I had just moved to Austin and just started my job as the Box Office Manager for FronteraFest. I worked the Short Fringe Box at Hyde Park on most evenings, and when I was done settling, I would duck around back and watch what shows I could.

I saw:
Buddy Daddy - Double Plus Squeeeeeeee!
Pgraph's French Farce - I was trapped behind the box counter, so I didn't get to see it, but I remember that I had no idea it wasn't scripted, and when I heard it was improvised, I still refused to believe people could be that funny and witty in the spur of the moment. [Side Note: This is also the first moment I ran into Valerie, and thus began many months of "I know her! How do I know her? Am I thinking she's from San Angelo because she is, or because I want her too be? She's so awesome! Why was my brain built like a cheese grater?!" etc etc... Blarg. Thanks for still liking me after all that ridiculousness Valerie!]
Girls Girls Girls - Dog Show: The Musical I remember thinking "Oh. Wow." It was like my brain couldn't put any of it together: Musical Theatre + Improv (still a very new concept anyway) = All System Shut Down. I remember drooling on one of the Girls after the show (Andrea maybe?) and getting her card, and shyly asking how one ever got to be in GGG, like a star eyed corn fed farm girl who just made it to the big city and saw this new fangled theater magic... Good times!

After all that bugaboo I started taking classes at The State School of Acting and a few months later and a few productions in between, I was starting to get really down on myself in classes, so I decided to take a just-for-fun "improv" class to see what it was all about and get some new perspective on this new (to me) kind of theatre. I saw that a Shana Merlin person offered 101 with the promise of fun and fancy free frolics and the rest is brief history!

Now you all are stuck with me because I love love LOVE improv and I love this fabulous community and I hope I get to be here for a long while yet.

Mwa Ha!

[Lindsey with an E]

Sarah, we've been leading parallel lives!

My first experience watching an improv show was at the 2008 Short Fringe. Look Cookie performed after my group and I snuck into the audience to watch (and they actually talked about cookies), and then when we were in Best of Week, I listened to Girls Girls Girls while waiting backstage to go on. And I thought, oh, we're so not going to be in Best of Fest. And we weren't.

I had taken 101 with Shana at the State in 2006 or 2007 and thought it was super-cool and fun. I hadn't imagined it as something one could make into a show, though, but a tool for being a better actor.

Then last year I took 101 and 201 and saw Girls Girls Girls at the Hideout and then Get Up at FronteraFest this year and, well, now I want to eat it for breakfast.

[vine311]

I want to hear Lampe's answer to this question. Also, Dav Wallace, Tom Booker and Asaf Ronen.

[Asaf]

I was thinking of posting to this thread, but thought it would be too obscure a show to matter to people.

But since I was pimped.

The first show I saw was in November of 1990, one month after I started doing improv. Until then my exposure to it was through the original British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

The group I saw was called Chicago City Limits and at the time they were performing out of the basement of the Van Huys Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Years later they would get their own theater.

The show was a mix of sketches and short form games as well as a medley of song parodies that they became very well known for. The cast included a man by the name of John Cameron Telfer who became a template for me to grow into as an improviser. He was smooth, witty and a bit smarmy as well. (Later on my template would become TJ Jagadowski.) There are only two games I remember from that set. One was Telfer doing Hesitation Speech and the other had the four cast members onstage, each with a newspaper, magazine or some form of reading material. One of them would start reading and another would interrupt them with their own reading material, but do it in a way that perfectly completed the sentence that they were interrupting.

I still think that is an incredibly amazing trick to pull off.

[TexasImprovMassacre]

I saw four day weekend in ft.worth in 2002. I still remember laughing at the first scene.

They started with a world news type segment where they turned to a page of that day's paper and read a blurb from one of the stories. Then improvised a scene based off of it. Oliver Tull says to the Frank, "what is dat"...frank said "my dog and my cat got fused together" and Oliver replied "so when I said what is dat, i was right".

[Roy Janik]

Sean Hill's answer, via Twitter:

first improv I ever saw was ComedySportz at their location on 6th St in Austin. Late 80's.

[Munga]

I saw "Star Trick: The Musical" in Vancouver around 1990. Spock was played by Dean Haglund, who later played one of the Lone Gunmen on the X-files.