Tuesday, June 06, 2006
The Dawning of a new age of FourPlay: The (Improvised) Musical!
And so the journey begins...
I'm new to this land of blogging, so you must forgive me if I stumble a little along the way.
So, I'm now truly underway with the madness of mounting an entirely improvised two-act musical (again!) with SAK. While the memories of the last run are starting to fade a little now, I would still liken the process to giving birth to a bowling ball without the benefits of modern medicine. It was messy, brutal at times, involved a lot of kicking and screaming, but ultimately resulted in something quite beautiful in its own odd way. Strained metaphors aside, the restless nights are already starting to settle in as the excitement starts to grab me again.
And that's the answer to the why in the "why do this" question. It is an undertaking, to be sure, but I've been involved with few improv projects on this scale and with this inherent level of risk. As the last cast will attest, I have this odd fascination with the balance between improv structure and freedom, and FourPlay really pushes that balance to the extreme. I love that! I'm a regular with SAK's short form show, Duel of Fools, but anyone who knows me well knows that I'm really a long form junky at heart.
FourPlay is deceptively difficult to describe to someone who hasn't seen it - I had a job last year pitching it in its largely raw form to SAK for that reason. Simply put, it features four players each evening who, in turn, create four characters each that interact and grow through approximately twenty improvised songs over the course of the two-act performance. While on some level, it is a musical parody, poking fun at some of the conventions and song devices of the genre, I really want it to be an earnest (albeit tongue-in-cheek) attempt at creating a new plausible two-act musical each evening. My theory is that no-one really wants to watch something that stays at the level of a parody for an entire performance (and there are other game formats that already do this quite well, such as SAK's short form, "Song Cues" or "That sounds like a song" game.) That goal, however, definitely raises the bar for us as a company and production team.
And in some ways, that's why I've been almost obsessed in my efforts to remount the show. Especially by the end of the run, I think we nearly had figured out how to realize the structure well enough that I could start to pinpoint where the structure itself might have been incomplete or getting in the way. So, a second stab at it gives me a chance to tamper a little with my own concept -- the show's DNA is you will -- with a new(ish) company of players who now, at the very least, know that what we're attempting can and has been done! It's surprising what a huge difference this little knowledge can make for a team of merry improvisers as they skip into the seemingly unknown horizon.
For those of you who saw the show last year - welcome back! Expect some new surprises. We're reworking the opening, tinkering with the second act a little, playing with some new song structures, and inviting some new talented folk into our midst. It'll be like a good friend with a facelift: oddly familiar but unsettling new... (I seem to have a knack for penning oddly disturbing metaphors.)
So if you love all things improvisational and musical (and I hope you do), then keep checking back here for updates on the madness that is mounting a longform improv show. And why not check out www.sak.com while you're at it, or my homepage, http://web.rollins.edu/~DCharles. We're just wrapping up the casting process, so I'll be posting the new company here in the next day or two.
Until then, keep doing what you're doing and checking IMFourPlay for news, gossip and directorial ranting...
Your humble and soon-to-be-mad director, David C.
And so the journey begins...
I'm new to this land of blogging, so you must forgive me if I stumble a little along the way.
So, I'm now truly underway with the madness of mounting an entirely improvised two-act musical (again!) with SAK. While the memories of the last run are starting to fade a little now, I would still liken the process to giving birth to a bowling ball without the benefits of modern medicine. It was messy, brutal at times, involved a lot of kicking and screaming, but ultimately resulted in something quite beautiful in its own odd way. Strained metaphors aside, the restless nights are already starting to settle in as the excitement starts to grab me again.
And that's the answer to the why in the "why do this" question. It is an undertaking, to be sure, but I've been involved with few improv projects on this scale and with this inherent level of risk. As the last cast will attest, I have this odd fascination with the balance between improv structure and freedom, and FourPlay really pushes that balance to the extreme. I love that! I'm a regular with SAK's short form show, Duel of Fools, but anyone who knows me well knows that I'm really a long form junky at heart.
FourPlay is deceptively difficult to describe to someone who hasn't seen it - I had a job last year pitching it in its largely raw form to SAK for that reason. Simply put, it features four players each evening who, in turn, create four characters each that interact and grow through approximately twenty improvised songs over the course of the two-act performance. While on some level, it is a musical parody, poking fun at some of the conventions and song devices of the genre, I really want it to be an earnest (albeit tongue-in-cheek) attempt at creating a new plausible two-act musical each evening. My theory is that no-one really wants to watch something that stays at the level of a parody for an entire performance (and there are other game formats that already do this quite well, such as SAK's short form, "Song Cues" or "That sounds like a song" game.) That goal, however, definitely raises the bar for us as a company and production team.
And in some ways, that's why I've been almost obsessed in my efforts to remount the show. Especially by the end of the run, I think we nearly had figured out how to realize the structure well enough that I could start to pinpoint where the structure itself might have been incomplete or getting in the way. So, a second stab at it gives me a chance to tamper a little with my own concept -- the show's DNA is you will -- with a new(ish) company of players who now, at the very least, know that what we're attempting can and has been done! It's surprising what a huge difference this little knowledge can make for a team of merry improvisers as they skip into the seemingly unknown horizon.
For those of you who saw the show last year - welcome back! Expect some new surprises. We're reworking the opening, tinkering with the second act a little, playing with some new song structures, and inviting some new talented folk into our midst. It'll be like a good friend with a facelift: oddly familiar but unsettling new... (I seem to have a knack for penning oddly disturbing metaphors.)
So if you love all things improvisational and musical (and I hope you do), then keep checking back here for updates on the madness that is mounting a longform improv show. And why not check out www.sak.com while you're at it, or my homepage, http://web.rollins.edu/~DCharles. We're just wrapping up the casting process, so I'll be posting the new company here in the next day or two.
Until then, keep doing what you're doing and checking IMFourPlay for news, gossip and directorial ranting...
Your humble and soon-to-be-mad director, David C.
