Review: 2017 Sarasota Improv Festival

The ninth annual Sarasota Improv Festival is now history. I came, wondering how this phenomenon has evolved. I came away with a few observations. Let’s start with the obvious …

The festival’s just plain bigger.

This year’s confabulation convention hosted a total of 22 improv companies. These included the Available Cupholders out of Austin, Texas; Joe Bill and Friends from Chicago; the nameless New York City troupe responsible for “Blank! The Musical;” Sarasota’s own FST Improv; Improv Boston (of Boston, duh); New York City’s North Coast Improv; and the bilingual talents of Mexico’s Complot/Escena. Over the three-day festival, performers from these various companies nominated Carrot Top for inclusion in Mount Rushmore, sang the praises of a “Hot Dog Cave,” and turned the story of Bob Marley’s life and death into a hip-hop opera.

Funny stuff. And there was a whole lot of stuff.

It’s only logical. More troupes means more shows. Size matters, and all that. But the festival’s grown in other ways. It shows a far greater repertoire of improv techniques.

The closing-night performance of “Blank! The Musical” further demonstrated the festival’s chaos theory of comedy. In the process, the performers took the improv art form into new, experimental territory. They accomplished this feat by cooking up a quick-serve Broadway musical based on random audience suggestions for genre, song titles and a climactic line of dialogue. Surprisingly, it was actually good.

This Bob Fosse-style jazz musical (with a sprinkling of “Les Mis”) explored the plight of a small town in Idaho. You meet the simple folk who are slowly starving to death in a potato famine under the iron heel of the local Potato Tycoon. Happily, they’re rescued by a messianic figure known only as Pimp Daddy Cobb.

Sure, the musical’s idiot plot went from silly to ridiculous and back to silly again. But the improv actors who made it happen demonstrated their mastery of the musical form. Some legit purveyors of Broadway musical theater would do well to hire them as script doctors.

Once this one-night wonder closed, die-hard improv fans stuck around for an “all-play” jam session featuring all 22 troupes. After that, FST turned off the lights, swept the various stages and left me with one big question:

How has improv comedy evolved over the nine years of the festival?

My gut feeling is we’re witnessing an end to the absolute rule of improv games. They still have their place and they’re still a lot of fun. But I think I saw a new emphasis on spontaneous sketches rooted in character motivation. (Come to think of it, that’s how the Second City troupe got the ball rolling in the first place. It was always about character and story.)

Along with a return to improv roots, the second big evolutionary leap was experimentation with music. “Blank! The Musical” was only one of many ad-hoc song-and-dance productions. These were crowd-pleasers — but it still surprised me. Musicals are hard — which means a higher level of difficulty for improv performers. Aside from keeping improv audiences happy, that might be the reason so many improv companies are breaking out into song.

When you keep evolving, the only way to go is up.