Austin Improv

is anyone doing/has done an improvised show with two parts, broken by a short intermission?

Confidence Men do a show in two acts, with a 45-second musical interlude.

A lot of the shows at BATs in San Francisco follow that model, I think. The Upfront Theater in Bellingham, Washington's Star Trek show had an intermission.

There is a good chance that some new shows at ColdTowne will have an intermission.

York99 wrote:There is a good chance that some new shows at ColdTowne will have an intermission.

Makes TOTAL sense when you've got alcohol sales in the mix.

R

Puppet Improv Project did that at SVT last fall. We did games in the first set and then an improvised musical in the second set based on the themes from the first set. I think we had a 10 minute intermission in the middle.

thanks everyone.

how did you (or the show) maintain the audience interest and keep them in the mindset of part one during the intermission?

or, if the show didn't do a particularly good job with making the intermission part of the overall experience, i'd like to learn from that too.

I have done a ton of shows with intermissions, most to allow for bar sales.

As far as keeping audience engaged, we (Pavlov's Dogs) asked for suggestions to be written down on paper, that we handed out to the tables with pens. It was a gamish form called Scenes You'd Like to See. We would give an example, and would recieve things like "GW Bush talks with a monkey", "what really happens at Apple" etc. People were super excited when we did 'their' idea. We randomly pulled them from a pitcher, read them aloud and they were started and edited by lights. It was silly and fun and gave us a good base of suggested material to use through out the second part of the night.

It's a combination of a good crescendo at the end of Act I and a promise to take it higher in Act II.

We do two unrelated forms at Show X on Mondays at HUGE Theater in Minneapolis.

Also, Ka-Baam, which Asaf taught us, has a very natural place for an intermission that has a cliffhanger feeling where you can't wait to see the result.

whj used to a format called real SURreal where we did a narrative one act and then did the play again with a surreal spin after an intermission. we had the audience leave the theatre so we could rearrange the space and lights so that when they came back it was a whole new vibe.

you can take cues from scripted work and make sure your second act is shorter, and like jill and asaf have said, try to make them hunger for what will happen in act two right at the end of act one.

we were also paranoid back in the day that the audience would think we were planning the second act, that when we did intermissions, the group would purposefully intermingle with the audience and make themselves visible to prove we weren't scheming. looking back, that seems a bit ridiculous, but you might get where we were coming from.

thanks guys!