Tonight my musical improv team Hotel Principality will be gracing the stage of ComedyWorx a week before our big trip to New York City for the Del Close Marathon. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in over the year and a half we’ve been performing as a group on stage. It’s also interesting how much we’ve changed over that period of time.
It started as a simple idea. When ComedyWorx started teaching longform classes, a few of us talked about forming a musical longform team. A group that would improvise a musical from beginning to end, right there on the spot. Nothing pre-planned. No musical safety net of lyrics or tunes. Just us out there winging it and at any time we might break out in a musical number that might be part of the story or flesh out characters in the story.
It was a very daunting idea. Much more complicated by the fact that you had to improvise with another performer playing the piano. If you both weren’t on the same page, the end result could be disastrous in the realm of a Bjork song gone bad.
But we were committed to the idea and through trial and error we started to click as a group and felt more comfortable with musical improvisation. We worked on our vocal exercises to strengthen our singing voices. We researched improvised song forms with other groups and took musical workshops with the likes of such musical improv teams as I Eat Pandas. All of a sudden, making up songs in front of an audience didn’t seem as daunting anymore.
Our next milestone as a team was being accepted into the 2007 Del Close Marathon in New York City. As one of the more well-known improv festivals in the nation it was an honor to be the first ComedyWorx team to ever be accepted there. Nothing could have prepared us for the adrenalin rush of being able to perform onstage in the heart of the Big Apple. It was an amazing experience that broadened our horizon as a team and made us feel like we were no different than other improv teams across the nation.
Which brings us to today. We’ve been pared down from the original 8 or more people(which included piano and bass guitar) to just 4 performers and a piano player. Our playing style has changed with the loss of some talented performers, but in our current iteration we continue to strive and learn the craft of musical improv. We have plans to do some new things outside of the normal musical story format and we’re extremely excited about it.
We’re scheduled to perform again on August 10th at the 2008 Del Close Marathon this year and it’s going to be just as much fun the second time a round. We’ll hopefully bump into all kinds of famous improvisors you might recognize from Saturday Night Live, Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show, Comedy Central or the Colbert Report. If we do, I’ll make sure to post the spotting here on my site.
As a warm-up to this festival in NY we perform at ComedyWorx tonight at 10:30 pm. It costs only $5 and it’s just a hop and a skip from the bars downtown. If you’re looking for something fun and cheap to do tonight, come on out and see us perform before we hit the stage next week in the city that never sleeps. I promise you won’t regret it.
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