Serious about comedy.

 

Home

About Jester

Sketch & Solo Performances

Improv Performances

Film & TV

The Jester Interviews

Jester's Blog

Book reviews

Favorite links

Follow jestershash on Twitter

Facebook

 

Their Space

UCB strikes gold with involving show based on audience members MySpace pages.

With a cast of top-notch performers, UCB’s MySpace show, which draws on audience members’ MySpace pages as inspiration for improvisation, has as its real surprise the inventiveness of Paul Scheer, who ends up dominating the proceedings.

Scheer interviews the audience members as he looks through their MySpace profiles through a laptop and projector screen set-up onstage, drawing out a lot of entertaining fodder for the cast to work with.

In the October 13 performance, the group had a 19-year-old girl who seemed to like everything, as Scheer happily and at length read off a seemingly unending list of her favorite things. The group also had a mid-twenties Tom Jones fan and another girl who supposedly was taking the singer Gavin DeGraw -- who ended up also showing off a lot of her friends’ pages.

The MySpace cast, made up of UCB stalwarts Rob Riggle, Jackie Clarke and Rob Huebel (with Scheer also getting into the improvisations), tended to work in short quick spurts, quickly making their points playing a lot more off the suggestion material than they might if only given a one-word suggestion. But with these players ability to generate characters on the spot, they could fully illustrate some of the suggested material very realistically.

UCB has really hit on a entertaining idea with this MySpace show and ought to continue it beyond just this month. Drawing from audience members’ lives like this readily draws the entire audience into the show a great deal more.

MySpace returns to the UCB Theatre at 8 p.m. October 20.

  

   

     

Custom Search

                                                                  Feedback? Email shashouamedia@gmail.com or michael.shashoua@jesterjournal.com.

                                                                                     © 2005-2018 Michael Shashoua