INSTANT CLASSIC?
Improvaganza gets literary
The world is small. Surprising connections get made. Improbable things happen.
This week, for example, a pair of English improvisers — stars of the first improv show in the world to be nominated for, and win, a major theatre award — will travel halfway around the globe. They will take to the stage in Edmonton at Improvaganza, the 16th annual edition of Rapid Fire Theatre’s international comedy festival. They’ll ask you, the audience, for stories from your own lives.
And from those, on the spot, in iambic pentameter, they’ll customcreate the Shakespeare play that the great man somehow never got around to writing. It might be a comedy, a history, a tragedy, a late-period romance: the choice is yours.
This towering achievement in improbability is Rhapsodes, the work of Adam Meggido and Sean McCann, who specialize in the most challenging reaches of spontaneity. They’ll do all the parts in this hitherto unknown Shakespeare play. And, as Meggido explains, they may well break into other tricky poetic metres, too; they might do stories from other famous writers. They’ll stop and consult you about what should happen next.
The most fiendish metre of all? Poe’s The Raven. “Incredibly intricate, very difficult to replicate. There are those who suggest it can’t be done and should not even be attempted ... Sean will be attempting it. If he fails he will be punished.”
“The audience gives us everything! What it’s called, where it’s set,” says Meggido, an amiable and witty conversationalist, which is possibly the only thing about him that ISN’T surprising given his theatrical proclivities. “And we keep going back to the audience for their input. We don’t abandon them after a minute.”
“The more we work with the audience the better the show. It’s unique for them. They own it; it belongs to them.”
Named for 3,000-year-old Athenian competitions of prowess in poetic metres, “basically the ancient equivalent of a rap,” as Meggido puts it, Rhapsodes is a relatively new show for the supple pair. It premiered at the Edinburgh Festival last year, and returns there this summer. Meanwhile, Meggido and McCann are celebrating their Olivier Award — the London equivalent of a Tony — for Showstoppers, an improvised musical with a company of 15, including live band, that they took to the West End.
“The idea is to make it look and feel, not like an improvised show, but a polished, choreographed, finished musical,” says Meggido. “Which is why people don’t believe it’s improvised ... Cynicism is a British characteristic. People were ‘I’m sure it’s a trick; I bet I know how it’s done.’ But all sorts of crazy theories of how we do it — earpieces, a team of writers backstage writing it and feeding it to us — were twice as complicated as actually doing it ourselves.”
He’s amused by this, and by the fun of audience discovery. “They think ‘this is impossible! No one can do this.’ And then we come out and do it, with as much panache as possible ... It’s taken us eight years of working together to build up our skills.”
The performance that garnered them the Oliver was set, by audience suggestion, in the tool shed in Buckingham Palace gardens. The musical styles the audience wanted were The Bee Gees, The Sound of Music, and the musical phenomenon of the year, Hamilton, with its groundbreaking melange of rock, pop and show tunes. They asked the audience to tweet their Act II suggestions at intermission, then used them.
And speaking as we are of spontaneity and inspiration, Meggido and McCann are connected to Edmonton in ways that couldn’t possibly be predicted.
Neither had done any improvisation before they met in The School of Night, the virtuoso London troupe named for the arcane underground sect headed by Sir Walter Raleigh.
A dozen years ago, the eccentric visionary Ken Campbell, the late, great prevailing muse of The School of Night, “had just come from Edmonton, watching DieNasty’s Soap-A-Thon,” says Meggido.
“‘It’s amazing!’ he told us. ‘Let’s do improv!’ ” And so it began. “Edmonton is the birth of this. If it hadn’t been for Edmonton there’s no way we’d be doing this. So for us, coming back to Edmonton is a bit like coming home ... There’s an Anglo-Canadian bridge that’s been very life-enriching for me and Sean.”
Both Meggido and McCann have been here for the Soap-A-Thon and Improvaganza; they’ve played Theatresports; they’ve done benefits for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.
When the Edmonton contingent of improvisers goes to London for the Improvathon there, “it’s like your extended family coming home for Christmas.”
He’s even bought a seat at the newly renovated Varscona. “I can’t wait to come and sit in it!”