PlayShop LIVE: SuperScene
Paramount Theatre, Bergman Room, Wellington
06/09/2013 - 01/11/2013
Production Details
PlayShop LIVE’s new season SuperScene features from Friday 6th September to Friday 1st November.
This season we bring back the element of competition, where we ask our audience to vote for the scenes that thrilled them most! Enjoy four different story-lines improvised by our four cast members, and bring back the stories you want more of!
Wellington’s late night comedy show EVERY Friday at 10:15pm at the Paramount Cinema. A troupe of trained performers brings you new comedy each week from songs to Shakespeare, poems to pirouettes… all improvised before your eyes.
Enjoy your Friday evenings with a rotating cast of 34 members, all of which are Wellington’s newest generation of story driven performers.
Anyone who likes “Whose Line is it Anyway” or “Thank God you are Here” will love this audience interactive show.
PlayShop constitutes a new generation of Wellington improvisers, drawing from a pool of Toi Whakaari, Long Cloud Youth Theatre, and Victoria University grads and students, all with a vested interest in theatre. As such, PlayShop is characterised by intelligence, energy, solid stagecraft, theatricality and emotional honesty. We believe the skills and philosophies of improv can be used to create exciting, risky, accessible theatre of all types.
Paramount Theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington
Every Friday from 6 September – 1 November
10.15pm, (approx. 80 mins)
MC: Daniel Pengelly
Musician: Oliver Devlin
Brynley Stent
Jack Buchanan
Patrick Carroll
Jimmy O’Donovan
Strange non-story made side-splittingly funny
Review by Shannon Friday 07th Sep 2013
The night starts with some improv games, familiar from Whose Line Is It Anyway. The games serve two purposes: we the audience get used to the idea of used to the idea of the actors making it up on the spot, and the actors get to check in with each other. Then the real work begins.
Four story beginnings are made up – one in the French Revolution, one in a high school movie, an audience member’s imagined childhood in Rome, and the story of a mysterious toilet-plunging lady who never speaks. As an audience, we vote for our faves to stick around, NZ Idol style.
The best fun is watching the dynamics between the improvisers/actors as themselves as they work together, set up jokes for each other, and (just occasionally) throw each other under the bus.
The story of the night – quite surprisingly – winds up being a about competitive toilet plunging. The dedication and self-awareness of the actors taking on this challenge – and the fantastic interaction with pianist Oliver Devlin – make this strange non-story side-splittingly funny.
If I had a quibble, it would be that sometimes it seems the people onstage are giving us what we ask for rather than what we really want. Sure, sex and fart jokes are great, but the real joy is in watching the live problem solving in front of us. The occasional ‘crowd pleasing’ crude joke doesn’t really make me want more. But, like I said, that’s a quibble; a concern over one or two moments late in the night, rather than something over-riding.
The whole evening is presided over by Daniel Pengelly, who is a master at handling a crowd: light-hearted and able to solve an early problem with a noisy drunk through relationship and laughter rather than power struggle.
The cast each have their strengths – from Brynley Stent’s ability to further any idea, serious or silly; Jack Buchanan’s messing with his fellow actors; Jimmy O’Donnelly’s great character moments; or Patrick Carroll’s understated ability to say exactly what I seemed to be thinking to the best comedic effect.
This was a fun, fun, night of entertainment, and I can’t wait to go again.
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