Points of view: theatre, comedy and news
Comedy streaming service Dropout today released the trailer for the new season of their fan favorite actual play series, Dimension 20. The new season, Gladlands, is set to premiere January 7th with episodes dropping every Wednesday.
The saying ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ couldn’t be more applicable to Jack Grossman and Zoe Wohlfeld’s A Night Of Drama. What starts off as a perhaps Renaissance-esque, Athenian public square practice of bringing a meritocratic, Speakers’ Corner element to theatre quickly devolves into a Hobbesian thought experiment that perhaps best exemplifies why Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is still very applicable.
Improv is difficult and subjective, more so than other genre. A performer really has to be at the top of their game in order to be even just halfway decent at improv, because there’s no one tool that they can rely on to move a scene forward. The quality of, improv mostly swings between two extremes, poor and fantastic. Holy Shit Improv can be safely considered the latter.
For all intents and purposes, the morning is quite a jarring time for comedy. Alex Prescot’s Cosy may just be the exception that proves the rule, providing the blueprint for how stand-up can still be enjoyable before midday as long as it follows the same general rules of a children's show; light, wholesome and plenty of music.
Improv is always a huge risk to go to as an audience member, just because there’s such a wild and fluctuating difference in quality that can occur. That being said, Holy Shit Improv is pretty much as safe a bet as you can make with this genre. I have never laughed as hard or for as long as I did during this show, there’s just no way to stop laughing at what occurs onstage.
MC Hammersmith’s The MC Stands for Middle Class is just about as good as it gets in terms of improvisation, music and comedy. It’s difficult to go back to listening just rap after this show, because what MC Hammersmith does is a lot more impressive than anything out there. Even Hamilton appears less ground-breaking after seeing this show.
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical is a Fringe institution. We walk in the room expecting a good time, to be thoroughly entertained by the cast’s antics onstage. What happens in that room becomes the stuff of legends and inside jokes.
On the heels of their Edinburgh Fringe debut, Founder of a troupe of ‘LA’s very best improvisers,’ Casey Feigh sits down with Pepper&Salt to discuss how recent events have intertwined with Holy Shit Improv’s history, the nature of improv comedy and the most important partisan issue in America; Twizzlers or Red Vines (there is a right answer to this question).
Pepper & Salt 