Bollywood Extravaganza . . . it's coming!

Hey all!

Just a note: the Great Puppet Bollywood Extravaganza! is well on its way! Fun cast, new puppets, all Bollywood. I super can't wait for it to open. Hee!

Best of the WHAT WHAAAAAT?

Un-Scripted just got voted BEST THEATER COMPANY in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay 2008 issue! Wooooooooohooo! Can I get a what what?

Thanks everyone who voted for us!

We rock!

Puppets on the Horizon . . .

Hey y'alls!

Just FYI: puppets are once again coming on the horizon . . . in November/December I'm directing The Great Bollywood Puppet Holiday Extravaganza! or whatever the heck we're gonna call it. The important things: it's gonna have puppets. It's gonna have Bollywood. And it's gonna be SO FUN!

I, being myself, have already started doing research. Not the fun movie kind, but the picky books kind. What can I say -- I have an English degree. Research is fun!

My current goal . . . to make a few puppets that look like Bollywood stars. Like: Amitabh Bachchan,



Shah Rukh Khan,




And Ashwarya Rai, perhaps.



I'm gonna do tons of research, along with my intrepid Assistant Director Dave Dyson, and we're gonna work on Bhangra and hip hop and Bollywood Dance, and watch a lot of movies, and make more puppets, and get some costume pieces together, and teach people how to fold saris . . . etc. It's gonna be, as I believe I mentioned, SO FUN!

but in the meantime, come see Theater: The Musical -- May 1-31, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

And check out 3dayslater.net. Unrelated. But you might recognize some familiar faces . . .

#&$*@%@%#%$%$$$!!!

Ahh, look at his green face. Never more to be seen.

It's been awhile, sports fans. By which I mean, Improv fans.

I think one of the reasons that I haven't posted in so long, is that I've been in mourning, I think, ever since a HORRIBLE THING happened. OK, it wasn't that horrible, AND, I wasn't that upset. But let us take a moment to remember Mel: oh, green, fuzzy, two-handed, softhearted puppet. Where are you? Some BASTARD broke the window of my car and stole you, along with your friends the little penguin, the little crab, and a whole host of storebought hand puppets. WHAT KIND of PERSON breaks into a car to steal PUPPETS? And ONLY puppets? It was a snatch-and-grab; had anyone looked in there, they might have found other stuff to steal, including a set of well-hidden keyboard speakers. But no, the door was never even opened. &$%#@. It could have been worse. Mel was the only one taken who I actually made. But still. They broke my WINDOW! Bastards.

Study that picture well, ladies and gentlemen. If you see that green puppet anywhere, get him the $%@& back for me!

Anyway. We've moved on. Next show is Let It Snow, and I'm the dance captain. Hooray! It's a super fun show, we have a lot of great guests, and I get to make people dance! Heeeee hee heeeeee. :o) It's my favoritest thing to do. I say that about a lot of improv-related things, but dance is right up there. Curious, since I HATE going "clubbing," or other kinds of freeform dance. I need structure.

I even took a couple of classes from the venerable Richard Powers (he's not that old, but he sure is venerated) at Stanford, in Club Two-Step and Cross-Step Waltz, so I would remind myself that I know what I'm doing, social-dance wise. Since we're kicking the dance up a notch (bam) this year, I wanted to go more in-depth about dancing together, to complement the things we already know about diamond dances, and other kinds of formation-based improvised choreography. It's great to get people to dance together, especially in a social-dance mode. It gets people to know each other, stand together, touch, etc. It makes people do something they don't know how to do, and that maybe they can't get right away. Plus, it makes other dance stuff that we do seem way easier. I'm a sneakypants.

And just in case you're missing the puppets, never fear, boys and girls. There's been some talk at season-planning meetings about . . . wait for it . . . Improvised Puppet Bollywood. For the HOLIDAYS. (Improvised Puppet Bollidays?) It's just talk, right now.

But it could happen.

Srsly.

I'm just sayin'.

The End . . . of the Beginning.

Man oh man. Who knew this show would be such a hit? (well, me. ahahahaa!) Selling out a weekend that wasn't even the last weekend is certainly an awesome thing. And the shows have been great, to boot. There've been some amazing theatrical moments that I've never seen onstage before, and that I'm really proud we created. We made people laugh AND cry. Seriously. People have cried. And not with laughter. I think I can die happy. I really learned a lot from the directing process in creating this show, and I think that all the castmembers have really made the show how I dreamed it could be. Good job, everyone! Hooray, us! Yay puppets! This is the last weekend. But it's merely the end of the beginning.


On a completely separate note: I'm always confused by people who think that improv is scripted. I mean, this is a topic I've gone over before. But still. Why would you go through the trouble of writing some of a script, when you could just not write one at all? True, I've done work with commedia dell'arte, where you do figure out the scenario beforehand. But those plots tend to be so basic . . . anyway, it was less fun than just improvising the whole darn thing. Takes longer. Then you gotta remember it . . . too much pressure! Just keep your eyes open and do the next obvious thing, and you've got it made; that's what I say.

Case in point: last night Aaron Loeb, friend of a castmember and author of the neato play First Person Shooter, which is playing at the SF Playhouse just down the hall from us, cane to see the show. Tim was talking to Aaron after the show, and apparently he was asking, "So which parts did you rehearse?" None. "So you practiced the songs beforehand, right?" Nope. On his way out he told us, "You guys HAVE to make sure you tell everyone that the Whole Fricking Thing is improvised."

I mean, Alan did say he would take suggestions to "influence" the show. But I always wonder: what about the play do they think is pre-scripted? How would we know what the audience would say? How would we know what kinds of songs to practice? Too much to remember. It is pretty cool, though, to get those comments from someone who makes story-crafting their business. What does it matter, in the end, whether it's improvised or not, if the audience enjoys it? Would they enjoy it any more or less? I dunno. 'Tis a question for the philosophers. (Or the comments section.) So anyways, thanks for coming, Aaron! Glad you enjoyed it! (sorry if I egregiously misquoted you. :o)

Ah, puppets. Truly you have taken on a life of your own. Look out, people, cause it's just the beginning.

We got reviewed!

One weekend down! And already a good review! Yeahhhh! Thank you, Pat Craig from the Contra Costa Times! We're glad you enjoyed the show. How cool is it to have our show described as "the ultimate theatrical experiment?" Very cool. That's how cool.

Our audience had a great time making finger puppets before Saturday's show; who knew craft projects and theater would go together so well? In fact, so well that we'll probably make it an ongoing Thursdays treat. And we may be incorporating some of the NUMEROUS scraps that we have from our own puppet construction, so you could be making a puppet that has Official Un-Scripted Puppet Parts. Yowza! You too could have a tiny part of Marcel . . .

Being a perfectionist and an improvisor at the same time is often difficult. :o) Usually the two sides of myself take turns. The perfectionist spends forty hours on the graphic design, for instance. While the improvisor cheerfully strays from the lesson plan when confronted with cranky fifth-graders. YET, when directing a show I get to be both at once, and so the uberperfectionist is at war with the playful, intuitive side. Clearly I want the show to be the best it can, so I notice all the tiny little things that I'm supposed to. But I'm SO pleased with how the show is coming together.

We've had some simply amazing moments. On Friday, the whole audience rose for the entrance of the bride (a puppet), and then when she was all the way down the aisle, everyone sat down. (And then giggled because they were so delighted by what they had just done.) On Saturday, a puppet was at its human psychiatrist talking about something difficult in its life, and the doctor held out some finger puppets and asked, "Would you like to show me with the puppets?"

Hooray! Twelve shows to go! (Plus, look for us at the Maker Faire next weekend!)

Puppets!

Open for Business!

We're open! We're open!

As I told someone earlier tonight: opening a show is like birthing a child. Or, birthing three children in three separate places at once. Stressful, confusing, a whole lot of pushing near the end. And then when you're done, you get to relax and enjoy the child you just birthed. Plus, this show neither cries nor poops as much as a real child. So that's something.

We had our first show tonight, which also happened to be the first time we ran through an entire show from start to finish. Yeeha! Well, it is improv. There's such a thing as overrehearsing. I am SO happy with how it went. The singing was super pretty. :) There are only fourteen more shows . . .

As is our tradition, after the first performance in the run we had a talkback with the audience, both to answer their questions, and to ask some of our own. It's like a preview performance, where audience input actually has the power to influence the development of the show. We ask people whether the show was how they expected it to be, whether they'd come back, what would have made the show more enjoyable for them, etc. Audiences are smart. It pays to listen to them. The talkback was very interesting, among other things because audience members confirmed some things I'd been suspecting, about the show. (Made me feel like I was being properly perceptive, as a director. Woo!)

For starters, it was pretty unanimous that a puppet can't be playing multiple characters--and not just that, but basically if it's been characterized in a scene, it also can't go back to being neutral. If Marcel gets endowed as the landlord, for example, and then he appears in a backup dance for another song and scene, people said they would wonder, "what's the landlord doing singing backup?" Unless, of course, there's a symbolic reason why he would. But the implication is, they'd still be thinking of him as the landlord, not as a random bystander. Hence, we need lots of extra puppets. As somewhat of a corollary, none of our people ended up playing multiple characters either; if they needed to be someone else, they grabbed a puppet. Maybe that should be a thing . . . is this a one-character show?

We still need to work on how to get the suggestion to start the show; I like the idea of a theme without a positive or negative spin on it, and I had been thinking we needed to ask for something else concrete as well, like find out about someone's job or something . . . someone in the audience independently echoed that statement. She felt we should pick one specific anecdote to tie down the theme. (We haven't really been focusing in rehearsal on using all the info in the suggestion, which maybe means we have to do that, or change the way we get information.)

While writing this, I had a thought. The last few times we've gotten stuff to do, we've had the characters working in an office that seems kinda generic. Tonight we also had an office, though it had more character and specific details than before. Yet, just now I realized why those generic offices might crop up in our stories: wait for it, are you ready?: almost none of us actually work in an office. Crazy theory, huh? I know we all work, and some of us work in offices, but not really in an "Office." As in, "The ___," or "___ Space." So I know I for one wouldn't really know what it's like. Huh. Interesting.

Welp, time to just keep bringin' it. We know we can do it, now that we've done it once. I can't wait for the rest of the shows! (And does this mean we get to make MORE puppets?!? Look out, living room. Here I come!)