UnMute - Improvisation on Zoom (UK) 20 Nov, 2020 ****

IMPROVISATION ON ZOOM 

On ZOOM on 20 November 2020

https://www.facebook.com/events/401589581206275/  

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars:****

 This review published only on this Blog. KH

L-R: Luke Sorba & Pippa Evans in UnMute

 

In UnMute, close up on the zoom screen, we see two improvisers minds in a whirl as they conjure character, place and dialogue in a split second. It is a joy to behold!

 

Improvisors, Luke Sorba and Pippa Evans (Oliver Award winner), create a series of Zoom calls between two people. Off-screen, Paz, the ‘Voice of Reason’, feeds them characters and locations taken from audience suggestions in Chat and calls ‘Unmute” to start each new scene.

 

The first scene features Adam (Luke), a bookseller who calls Helen (Pippa) who is working in a sweatshop making leather trousers and is terrified she will be caught chatting on Zoom. She hilariously uses the Zoom screen to show her tiny fingers that help with the fine stitching.

 

In the second call, Helen (Pippa) then calls her social worker, Rupert (Luke), to discuss her current employment in the sweatshop. However, his incompetent advice and obviously dodgy duplicating of her passport, all lead to him admitting he is not a social worker but a former casino worker who was furloughed and retrained during the pandemic.

 

Rupert, (Luke) then speaks to an anxious woman is Picadilly Circus as she stands by the statue of Eros. and they reveal they are a couple and their conversation escalates into an argument about their marriage and his demands on her.

 

This same supercilious wife (Pippa) then talks to her unbearably over-confident, smug yoga teacher, Marco and they get mired in murky existential psychobabble. The improvisers minds create some riotous dialogue including him naming his yoga poses after types of pasta e.g. the Fettuccini. She then teases him with sexual innuendo about the Downward Dog.

 

The yoga teacher (Luke) in Hampstead calls a Scandi Noir detective, Lisbeth, (Pippa) in Stockholm to search for a missing person – his yoga student. She speaks in cryptic, odd English in an accent that is a collision of Swedish and Welsh, using strange and indirect allusions.

 

Finally, Lisbeth, the Scandi detective, calls Adam, the bookseller (Luke), to order books on dream interpretation. Her strange English expression and mad dreams and imagery prompt him to write his own book and her asks her to help him.

 

UnMute is a hoot to watch as the two improvisers, with great ease, weave a web of interconnected stories and finally make sense of this improvised world of characters

 

 

by Kate Herbert

Pulp Playhouse Reunion 7 Nov, 2020 ***1/2

IMPROVISATION THEATRE

Produced by Pulp Playhouse hosted by BATS Improv 

Date: 7 Nov 2020 via ZOOM 

Reviewer: Kate Herbert 

Stars: ***1/2

This review published only on this blog. KH

Top L-R: Regina Saisi, Rafe Chase, Joshua Raoul Brody; Lower L-R: O-lan Jones, Mike McShane, Brian Lohmann 

 

On 7 November 2020, BAT Improv hosted a reunion show by members of Pulp Playhouse, an inspired and inspiring company of improvisers who explore genres in their storytelling.

 

The company’s first show was 23 April 1988 in San Francisco. and the members changed over the years. The shows I saw in the 90s featured Paul Killam, Diane Rachel, Barbara Scott, Regina Saisi and others.

 

This online show boasts improvisers from San Francisco and Los Angeles: Regina Saisi (director of the show), Rafe Chase, O-lan Jones, Brian Lohmann and Mike McShane, with music by the incomparable Joshua Raoul Brody.

 

On the Zoom screen, we see the improvisers narrate stories and play characters alone in their homes, some against virtual backgrounds, as they tell crime fiction stories in the style of pulp novels. Each is a discrete narrative introduced by a pre-determined character who asks for a story title from the audience who post their title ideas in the Zoom Chat.

 

In Story One, Regina Saisi, as narrator, Eleanor Hillary Shackleton III, is in a snowstorm surrounded by her huskies. She tells the story of The Wild River in which Cynthia meets Ralph, a gentleman who slips into a river. She saves him with her poetry and, perhaps more practically, with a makeshift canoe that tumbles over a waterfall.

 

The narrator of Story Two is Brian Lohmann playing Arlo Fisk, former – or is failed – FBI agent, now FBI archivist, who welcomes us to FBI: Inside! from the FBI Archives library (a black and white, virtual background).  Fisk, a character Lohmann created for early Pulp shows, narrates the story One Bullet, an exciting story told by a dull man. Lohmann’s characterisation of the dour FBI officer, Fisk, is awkward, rigid and hilariously earnest.

 

‘Crime is bad. Nobody likes it!’, says Fisk dryly.

 

In One Bullet, Mike McShane as Herman Kitter, a man of influence, is confronted outside his barber shop by a man and woman with nude photographs that could ruin him. Lohmann, as Fisk, says about Kitter, ‘He had a susceptible kidney’.

 

Story Three is narrated by Rafe on his character’s 30^th anniversary with his ventriloquist dummy bride. He tells his bride a story about a woman (Regina Saisi) alone in a cabin who meet and befriends Sasquatch (McShane) outside her lonely cabin. This becomes a love story as eccentric as that of the narrator and his dummy bride.

 

O-lan Jones as Roliimpsia Queen of the World, the laid back and petulant warrior princess, narrates The Swedish Fish, a story about Princess Volartua (Regina) whose herald finds in Sweden a poetic Fish (Brian) that can sing a beautiful, Swedish Fish song.

 

The final story is by Mike McShane as elderly Peepers Keeperbaum, a former child star living in a retirement home. In his crusty aged voice, McShane narrates the clever and witty Clara Bow and the Model T, about a meeting between Clara Bow, pert, silent movie actress with a squeaky piping voice, and Henry Ford, inventor and captain of industry.

 

The expertise and ease of these versatile and masterly improvisers creates narratives and characters that inspire and entertain. Let’s hope for more reunions shows.

 

by Kate Herbert

Love Letters to Melbourne, 6 Nov 2020 ***1/2

 

CABARET / BURLESQUE

By Finucane & Smith

Zoom on Thurs 5 Nov 2020 at 7pm

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***1/2

 This review published only on this blog. KH

This online version of Love Letters to Melbourne by Finucane & Smith, is a cornucopia of diverse performers streaming to us directly from their living rooms, bedrooms and even a bathtub.

 

It comes to us via Zoom – with all the expected zoomy technical problems that crashes the streaming just after interval. (Maybe it came back online, but I gave up trying after 10 minutes.)

 

Rachel Lewindon plays pre-show piano while we peer at other guests – in their Zoom windows – lounging, sipping wine or wandering off waiting for the show to start.

 

Our host, the inimitable Moira Finucane, steps on screen and greets almost the entire audience of 100+. She glitters in lame, pouting her scarlet lips as she talks about Melbourne deserved this love after being locked down for 100 days.

 

Shirley Cattunar, a woman in her 80s, sings Stand By Me from her couch, unaccompanied.

 

To the song, One Night in Heaven, and watched by a gaping Molly Bashful, Maude Davey pulls strawberries from her bosom under her strapless black taffeta gown.

 

In his Sydney studio and wearing glittery boots and a belt of stuffed toys, Paul Cordeiro performed a dizzy disco dance.

 

Next, Caroline Lee tells an erotic suburban poolside story featuring zucchinis, nipples and Derek’s glistening shaft, that was inspired by Lockdown and is interrupted at a crucial moment by a Zoom drop out!!

 

Meanwhile, Maude Davey almost upstages Lee, as Davey dressed for her next spot wearing red, thigh high boots and shimmering black veil obscuring her face and moving to Am I Blue.

 

Mama Alto sings Memories (Streisand) unaccompanied, then Finucane returns as the Milk Queen, in her bath, wearing white bikini and pearls, grimacing and writhing in litres of milk.

 

After a short interval, Die Roten Punkte, Otto and Astrid, perform from their bedroom Second Best Friend (Ooh ah!), “Time to wake up to tickle all the corners.” This is their love letter to Melbourne.

 

The Zoom failed on Otto and Astrid’s last, lip-smacking, screen-kissing farewell and we were left marvelling at the impact of Zoom in our lives as artists and wondering what came next in the Love Letters.

 

By Kate Herbert

 

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