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. |