A night at the [made up] movies

The Style High Club returns

Last night was the opening night of our latest Improguise Style High Club run of Improv shows: A Night at the Movies.

As the lights went down after our final game [which saw the audience pick two of their favourite characters from the whole evening and we stuck them in the same movie ending together] there was a near-deafening roar as the front row instantly were on their feet clapping, followed by most of the rest of the room. Cannot remember when last we received a standing ovation [although i recall one when we introduced our instant favourite Tribute styled show a while back]. But there it was – a close contest between the audience and the nine of us [eight actors and Godfrey the amazing pianist] as to who had had the most fun on the evening.

This was the second time we had attempted this style of show which is a fairly loose format in which everything you see had something to do with the movies – so from trailers to director interviews to styled scenes to hit songs to foreign movies [with provided subtitles] absolutely anything could [and did!] happen.

The only ‘planned’ part of the evening was that we decided to start the show with a movie trailer to warm us all up and so we asked the audience for the title of a never before seen movie and dived right into the trailer for the movie ‘Rise of the Turtle’ with voice over and a quick montage of short clips from the movie forming the preview which had the audience in stitches.

The rest of the evening was a rollercoaster of scenes that included an encounter between Goofy and Gandalf (in response to our question to the audience of what two movie characters would you like to see in a scene together?), the hospital drama where saying the letter ‘D’ caused intense reaction from the patient suffering from Fripples [an entire scene where everyone left out the ‘D’ in words and later  ‘S’ as well – absolute mayhem!], that hit show-stopping animated song you won’t hear in a Disney movie titled ‘Momma hates dad!’ and an interview with the director of the award winning South African drama ‘There’s a roof on my stoep!’ plus a period piece scene from the movie ‘Waiting in Silence’ we then saw replayed in a Stephen King horror and then once more as a Shakespeare. 

The audience were delightful and gave us some amazing suggestions that we were able to turn into parts of movies and really seemed to have thhe very best of times.

We will literally be doing shows all week

The beauty of it is that we will be back tonight at 9pm at Alexander Bar for another completely made up show: This time Seep, a South African soap opera. And i believe we may already be sold out [so jump online and book quickly if you’re hoping to see one of our other shows before we end on Sat!]

Thursday will see us performing an entire period piece drama titled ‘Senseless and Spontaneity’.

On Friday it is the turn of the dimly lit murky Film Noir detective story.

Our final show on Saturday night we are calling Best of the Fest and it will be all about a movie festival where different directors will speak about the made up movies they brought to the festival and entertain us with clips from the various films.

What an absolute privilege

It is incredible to realise that it has now been 20 years since i first stepped on to stage with Improguise [then called TheatreSports] and that we are Cape Town’s longest running show and also maybe even more hard for me to get my mind around that i am still allowed to do this stuff. So much adrenalin and creativity and nervous energy and fun all packed into one. And it is never the same. And it never gets old.

So thank you to you the audience who come and support us year in and year out. 2019 has been a year of sold out festival shows which is a first for us on such a regular basis and so that seems to suggest that we might be doing something right. i am completely loving the longer format shows that we are doing now and the fact that we keep pushing ourselves with new formats and styles and risks which continue to work [most of the time!] and keep our audiences entertained.

There are a few seats left to come and watch us this week, but there won’t be for much longer so make sure you jump on to the Alexander Bar site and book your tickets right now…

In FIVE…. FOUR…. THREE…. TWO….. ONE…. 

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