Dinosaur Prom Improv, Spring 2013 shows

The teen improv group my son is in has two shows coming up: one this weekend and one in May as part of the Santa Cruz Improv Fest, a month-long showcase of Santa Cruz’s improv troupes.

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This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Ten of Us

The Broadway Playhouse

526 Broadway St, Santa Cruz, CA

Sunday, April 28, 2013, 7:00 pm.

$6

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Santa Cruz Improv Fest Performance

The Broadway Playhouse

526 Broadway St, Santa Cruz, CA

Sunday, May 12, 2013, 7:00 pm.

$15

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Information about their shows can usually be found at Upcoming Shows | Dinosaur Prom Improv.

Although I may be biased as a parent of a cast member, I find their shows to be pretty funny, and the laughter from the audience suggests that I am not alone in this assessment.

WEST summer 2013 season

I just signed my son up for all the summer acting that WEST performing arts is offering to teens this summer:

• Teen Production: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (2013 June 17–2013 July 7)
• Actors Conservatory with Theatre Témoin: WEST meets London’s West End – Devising An Original Play (2013 July 8–2013 July 19)
• Teen Conservatory w/Shakespeare Santa Cruz; Scene Study Intensive (2013 August 5–2013 August 17)

That’s almost 7 weeks of acting (July 4 is a holiday), at 5–7 hours a day, 5–6 days a week (the teen production is longer, but less intense than the two conservatories).  The acting classes will cost $2265 (plus tickets to see the shows), or a bit less than $10/hour for the classes.

All three of the classes are scheduled to be in the West End Studio Theatre, which I’ve not seen since they did some remodeling in the fall (all his productions during the school year have been in the Broadway Playhouse, an older, smaller space). The West End Studio Theatre is much more flexible, as it is basically just warehouse space, and they can set up the stage and audience seating in various configurations—they even did arena seating for Hunger Games last year.

The collaborations with Shakespeare Santa Cruz have been going on for several years, but the one with Theatre Témoin is new.  I think that it will be good for my son to learn the more physical style of acting that they will be teaching, as he tends to focus more on the verbal part of acting than on his physical acting (not exclusively, of course).

Summer Classes 2013 | West End Studio Theatre – Santa Cruz, CA

The children’s/teens’ theater group that my son performs with has released their summer camp schedule: Summer Classes 2013 | West End Studio Theatre – Santa Cruz, CA.

They have 15 different camps this summer, ranging in length from 1 week to 3 weeks (with two having a 1-week/2-week option), and ranging from ages 4–7 for the youngest group to ages 14–21 for the oldest.  Most of the summer camps are done by grade range (grades 1–4, 4–10, 6–12, …), but the youngest and oldest groups poke out of the normal K–12 grade range, and use age ranges instead.

The grade and age ranges are usually fairly large (6 or 7 years) and the classes accommodate kids with a wide range of acting experience, from first time on stage to 40 previous productions.  The teen productions often have many of the same kids in them (the theater-obsessed kids), but there are usually a couple of first-timers also.  I’m always pleased to see how well the kids incorporate newcomers, make them welcome, and get them to perform at a fairly high level.

There is no auditioning at WEST—the teachers assign parts after observing the kids for a few classes and getting input from them about how big and what sort of part they want (some prefer having a lot of lines, others prefer having less to memorize, some like mainly verbal roles, others prefer primarily physical roles, …).

Casting is often quite complex, with one actor playing several roles, or multiple actors playing the same role.  In some of the larger classes they do two casts, with the leads in one casts having bit parts in the other cast.  One particularly memorable production was of Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy,  which had only one cast, but almost every role was played by 2 or 3 actors and almost everyone had multiple roles, using costuming to maintain continuity.  I doubt that it would have worked in a more serious play, but Hitchhikers’ Guide is surreal enough and comical enough that it worked quite well.

This year, there are three summer acting camps that my son is eligible for:

• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a 3-week comic production)
• Conservatory with Theatre Témoin (1-week or 2-week physical theater and devised theater)
• Shakespeare Conservatory with Shakespeare Santa Cruz (1-week or 2-week Shakespeare intensive)

(He’s also eligible for the tech class, but he’s done that one before and decided he’d much rather be on stage than doing tech work.)

He’s decided he wants to do the comic production and the Shakespeare conservatory, but he’s not decided about the physical theater yet.  Personally, I think that the physical theater would teach him the most, as his acting has almost always centered around the lines and the verbal delivery (even his improv work tends more toward the verbal than the physical).  He’s worked with the Shakespeare Santa Cruz people several times now, but not with Theatre Témoin, whose collaboration with WEST is new this year.

But summer theater is at least as much about recreation as it is about improving skills, so I leave the decisions up to him.  He may think that 7 weeks of intensive theater work is too much for this summer, as it won’t leave much time for recreational programming.  (It would give him a good excuse for not working on college application essays for those weeks, though.)

Continue your conversation at home

Every once in a while I get pointed to a blog post that is well outside my usual RSS feeds, but strikes a chord with me.  Today, while I was trying to convince myself to get back to work a chain of links starting from one of my e-mail messages ended me up at Stuart Bousel’s recent post Theater Around The Bay: Please Continue Your Conversation At Home.

I don’t know who Stuart is—other than the claim at the end of the post:

Stuart Bousel is one of the founding artistic directors of the San Francisco Theater Pub, and a prolific writer and director. His website, http://www.horrorunspeakable.com, will tell you all about it.

The post describes an incident that happened at a play he was attending with a friend.  Neither of them cared much for the play (though one was seeing it a second time) and were discussing the flaws of the production at intermission (which is one of the things that my family does at poor theater productions, trying to figure out why it isn’t working—we do similar analysis of good productions, trying to figure out why they are working so well).  As a professional writer and director, Bousel undoubtedly does that to a greater extent (and with more real knowledge) than we do.

What happened to him was that a woman in the row in front of him turned around and told him “Hey guys, please continue your conversation at home. People can hear you.”  If he had been talking during the performance, she would have been right to try to silence him, but during the intermission? while he was discussing the play he was watching?   I don’t understand her point of view at all.

Bousel has a theory, though, based on observations of Bay Area audiences and cultural attitudes: people in the Bay Area are pleasure seekers, and “in full Yay Bay fashion, doesn’t want to hear anything that’s gonna harsh her buzz, and since I can’t prove otherwise, I kind of take it that it’s less that she cares what I think, so much as she objects to me expressing it at all.”

Bousel describes another incident that happened to a friend:

… being the only person laughing at a comedy performance she genuinely and heartily adored (these weren’t pity laughs), while a bunch of stone faced couples sat around her refusing to give the performer anything more than the occasional smile or titter. At the end of the show, the audience, practically silent the whole time, gave a standing ovation that mystified Helen. She had liked the show—a lot—but it was, after all, a light comedy. Afterwards, as the audience was filing out of the theater, a woman near her (“Lilybeth”) turned and said, “I can’t imagine how the performers could concentrate with you laughing like a hyena all night long.”

I have a hard time imagining actors in a comedy preferring a stone-faced audience to one that laughed at the right places.  I have an even harder time imagining an audience believing that it is politer to give a standing ovation than to laugh at a joke.  (Of course, since this is a third-hand story at this point, I’m free to conjecture all sorts of things—like that it was really intended to be a tragedy and was only funny because of how bad it was, or because the one person laughing was higher than a kite.)

Bousel’s point is that live theater depends on having an audience, a live audience—otherwise you might as well go watch TV at home.  The audience should laugh at the humor, weep at the emotional scenes, and talk about the play afterwards and during intermission.

Santa Cruz may not have the large number and diversity of theaters that the Bay Area has, but the local audiences don’t seem to be as bad as Bousel paints the Bay Area audiences (or maybe he’s deliberately pulling out the most extreme examples he can think of ).  Santa Cruz makes even more of the laid-back lifestyle and “what’s your pleasure?” attitude than San Francisco does, but less pretentiously—we have a lot of restaurants, but the expensive “concept” restaurants tend to fold while the ones that concentrate on good food and good service at a reasonable price tend to stay around for decades.  Perhaps that is really what Bousel is missing in San Francisco—not the New York passion or the LA dreams, but honest individual responses that are not just groupthink.

It’s too bad that Santa Cruz does not have enough money floating around to support a bigger theater scene, because Bousel’s vision for what he wants the San Francisco Theater Pub to accomplish sounds like it would fit right in here.

I was noticing a comment further down from “Sig” saying

I frequently get the side-eye when I’m at museums and galleries and I talk about the art. I once got a haughty, deep sigh and a serious eye roll from a stranger who overheard me telling my museum companion that I thought a painting’s frame was gaudy. I didn’t even criticize the painting itself and I got eye rolled; and it’s not like the painting cared. But talking about art, curation, and the museum itself while still in the museum is typically frowned upon.

Sig should definitely come visit the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz.  In the last year Nina Simon has made it the Museum’s mission to get people to interact more in the museum—she would love to have visitors to the museum talking animatedly about the art—even if the talk is mostly critical.   (First Fridays are free, if that is an issue.)

Reflections on teen improv

logo by Hunter Wallraff

On Sunday, 2012 Dec 2,  I went to see two different teen improv troupes: Water the Weeds in the afternoon, and Dinosaur Prom in the evening (I announced those shows here previously).

The Water the Weeds troupe had about 16 members, roughly equally divided between male and female, while Dinosaur Prom has 10 (7 male and 3 female).  I found the two shows quite different, though they played some of the same improv games (both played the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly advice show game, for example).

Both troupes have shows every few months (maybe 3 times a year) and both troupes have an adult coach.  Both troupes practice about once a week, for similar amounts of time. The Water the Weeds troupe has been around since at least 2006 (when it was a younger kids troupe), while Dinosaur Prom started in the fall of 2011, and did their first show Jan 2012. Most of the players have been with the troupe for about a year. I don’t know how many of the Water the Weeds troupe are new players and how many have been with the troupe for years.

One might expect the longer-running troupe to be more polished, but the opposite was true—Water the Weeds came across a lot like a school play with earnest students trying hard, but not quite getting things to work.  There were a couple of players in Water the Weeds who seemed to know what they were doing, but they were often partnered with weaker players so that the ensemble as a whole rarely kept the action moving.  It was not a bad show for a class, but it was clearly a for-parents-and-friends-only production.  The adult coach stepped in several times to announce things and keep the show moving.

Dinosaur Prom, on the other hand, kept the audience laughing practically their whole show.  Several of the players had excellent comedic timing and came up with good material, and even the weakest players could at least keep straight lines coming for the others to work with. The adult coaches for Dinosaur Prom were not visible during the show (one was in the audience, the other in the tech booth)—the teens took care of all introductions, game announcements, explanations, and transitions themselves.

The biggest problem with the Dinosaur Prom show was that it was too short, at under 45 minutes.  I believe that they had planned to have a show that was over an hour long, but they ran through their playlist faster than they expected. The troupe also did one long-form game that may not have lasted as long as they had planned on. Part of the short running time was because they knew when a game had run dry and moved quickly on to the next one without awkward pauses (except at the very end, when their set ended rather abruptly). There may have been some directorial influence, in that the lighting was generally lowered between games—it may have been the adult coach in the tech booth recognizing when it was time to move on to the next game, rather than the teens themselves, but if so, the signaling was subtly done.

For future shows, I think that they need to plan enough games for a 2-hour show and have someone checking the time before each game to see if they are over an hour.  Once they hit the hour mark (or 1:10 or whatever they are aiming for), they can jump forward in their playlist to whatever they planned for their finale (or ask the audience for advice about what to do next).

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes the difference between the two troupes.  Is it just a random difference about who joined which troupe?  Is it a difference in coaching and rehearsal style? Is it a difference in selection process for troupe members?  Is it a difference in the intensity of the rehearsals because of the difference in troupe sizes?

I don’t know what makes for the difference in the performances, but I have some conjectures.  First, I think that Water the Weeds puts all their students in the performance, whether they are ready or not, while Dinosaur Prom is the performing troupe that students graduate to from an improv class—not all the class members perform with Dinosaur Prom. Second, I believe that 16 is too large a troupe to really get enough practice playing against other members of the troupe.  The pairings go up quadratically with the troupe size, so just increasing the practice time linearly with the number of players is probably not enough. Third, I think that coaching styles are different, with the Dinosaur Prom coaches inspiring the teens to higher levels of performance—but I’ve not observed either troupe in practice, so I don’t know what the differences are. Fourth, I think that Dinosaur Prom got lucky with a couple of very creative improv players who push the others to improve.

I believe that both troupes will be participating in the Santa Cruz Improv Fest next May.  I think that Dinosaur Prom will be as good as some of the adult and college troupes who are the mainstay of the Improv Fest.

More details about Dinosaur Prom can be found at their temporary web site, which will move to a more permanent location after it is completed.  Disclaimer: My son is part of the Dinosaur Prom troupe (see my post Dinosaur Prom improv), and so I may be unduly biased in their favor.