The New Zealand Improv Festival is back for its sixteenth year. I found myself in the audience of the Opening Gala on Friday night.

[Disclaimer: Usual disclaimer, I work for the Festival, which means I have a bit more innate knowledge of the inner workings than most people. Improv reviewers with available schedules are few on the ground this year; and I didn’t have any part in programming, casting or directing this show.]

Across the last few years, the Improv Festival opening show has taken a few forms. Last year it was the nautical-themed All Aboard!, and in previous years it’s been Here’s a Thing!, a gentle showcase of show-adjacent games. This year, it is simply the NZIF Opening Gala, a two-part improvised harmony across ninety minutes.

Hosts and Festival Co-Directors Jim Fishwick and Matt Powell have set their cast – Lesa MacLeod-Whiting, Guanny Liu-Prosee, Andrea Ferpo, Cale Bain, Jason Geary and Caitlin Penhey – a task for this year’s opening show: bring in a bunch of prompt words that they feel fit the Festival’s theme for this year. Here. Together. Now. And these will be used in scenes. 

The performers have acquiesced, with much fervour, and these words are pulled for the scene-building for the first half of the show.

Lesa and Jason begin with ‘kneading’ and ‘dizzy’ and we are off to the races. It’s a genuine delight to watch these improvisers in their element absolutely blossom in front of the audience. Andrea’s first word – ‘telenovela’ – gifts us with a heightened telenovela scene and as well as a sexy man on a motorbike (played by Cale), who ends up woven into the show across the rest of the duration.

‘Praying mantis’ as the cue word brings Guanny and Matt together praying mantisly for a moment with murder on the mind – and Jason as the desperate waiter trying to stop the praying (preying?) mantis murder from happening, and then ‘ceiling’ – as contributed by Guanny – tees up a scene from Jim with the opening line, “I’m so happy to have you in me,” which makes the audience screech louder than I’ve heard in years. (Jim’s playing a ceiling. It becomes a scene about personified building features. You just had to be there.)

We roll through scene after scene until the final one of the first half. Cale, seemingly being gently punished for his particularly blue jokes in previous scenes, has passed away, and the rest of the performers must eulogise him using their remaining prompt words. Caitlin, who’s known him for maybe three hours at this point, uses her prompt words to describe him as ‘puffy’ and full of ‘moisture’, and Andrea ends the first half with a particularly saucy gesture as a send-off.

After a short break, muso for the evening, Jamie Burgess (performing his own show later in the Festival, The Music Made Me Do It)recaps the first half by singing a song about the sad piano man and Cale’s unfortunate demise.

Guest monologists aren’t alien to the improv scene, but in an exciting twist for the evening, we’re joined by Courtney Johnstone, the CEO of Te Papa Tongarewa, who tells us some stories about items in the Te Papa collection to serve as improv prompts for the second half of the show.

The first item is about the shortarse feelerfish, one of the most unconventional fish that’s found in Te Papa’s Fishes of New Zealand. A portion of Te Papa’s work in the fish sphere goes into the taxonomy of newly-discovered New Zealand fish, and Courtney spins us a yarn about the naming of this particular one. The performers use this story to jump into a variety of scenes.

One of Courtney’s off-handed quips about the difference between fish (plural) and fishes comes back in a big way in a feat of taxonomical improvisational brilliance near the end of this segment – major props to Lesa for finding a way for the phrase, “nominative determinism” to land as a joke.

Courtney’s second story is about the giant carnivorous snails of Khandallah – the Powelliphanta – described as, “Aotearoa’s most dramatic snails,” which live for twenty-plus years, and also have a great name for a gag if one of your performers is called Matt Powell.

Snail Shakespeare (Snaikspeare?), attempted seductions, slime-based breakups, all come into play when there’s snails on the mind, and our performers absolutely plumb the joyous performative depths.

We end the show with Courtney’s final story. The year is 1770 and HMS Endeavour is stranded on a reef. To lighten the load and get the ship free of the reef, the Endeavour’s crew must toss things overboard. Will Sir Joseph Banks’ botany collections be thrown into the sea? Only history can tell.

Guanny and Jim open with a vocal fry-laced couple moment – “If me and your plants were on a sinking boat, what would you save?” – followed on by Scooby Doo impressions, another dramatic death leaving Matt collapsed over Jason’s body in a truly Hollywood pastiche (lots of death tonight), and concluding in a fabulous interpretive dance piece performed by Caitlin and Guanny, with Lesa as an ennui-laced Sir Joseph Banks next to the piano. “To you, it’s just a leaf, but to me, it’s a legacy,” she opines, and it’s a beautiful place to end the show.

This Gala is a perfect way to begin the New Zealand Improv Festival, showing off the talents of some of its performers and celebrating the city that we call home. Though not all the improvisers have worked together before, they never miss in their performances, even though what they’re performing often skirts the line of absurdity.

The addition of Courtney’s knowledge and storytelling especially is a buoyant welcomer to those who have travelled to join us in Pōneke this year (some from halfway across the world). The improv format is gentle, never overly-apparent or cloying, just simple storytelling for those whose grasp on improv leans more towards the short form game-playing. The choices made in the production of the NZIF Opening Gala for 2025 speaks to the skill of the Festival Co-Directors, Matt and Jim, who made it all possible.

It can be hard to quantify improv in the same way you quantify theatre; but I’m certain the audience around me had as joyous a time as I did, and there’s no better way to describe the efficacy of a show than that. I just wish there’d been more of Courtney and Te Papa’s stories. I could have listened to them for hours.

The New Zealand Improv Festival continues this week, with some of the Gala show performers bringing their own works to the stage. Jason Geary directs The Dictionary of Moments on Friday, and Andrea Ferpo’s Living is Like appears on Thursday.

If you want to see more of the New Zealand Improv Fest, come along. Or don’t. I’m not your mum.

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