Project Steve

A dress rehearsal is a very hard thing to do when you are an improvised show. For one, you don’t have an audience to make suggestions. Luckily the techies are on hand to give suggestions, if in a somewhat grumpy and sarcastic way. The ever-wonderful Mr Jon Pretty was on hand to take some photos of our performances. The gallery is included below.

Some members of Project Steve (Alex, Laila and Rich) along with official Steve hanger on Jon took a trip to the seaside today to relax before the stress of the show. Some of the less awful photos are included below.

Hooray, hooray, we’re off today!

Fun filled train hours to come… and the opening afternoon show so soon! (That’s 2.45, Augustine’s, George IV Bridge, in case you possibly didn’t know… )

Hopefully see you in Edinburgh!

The AIHOAE tee-shirts have arrived. Witness their beauty as modeled by lovely James Sharpe. He graciously took time out from rehearsing Once Upon a Time to dress like a banana.

Look at how happy he is

Hello! Me again. Less than a fortnight till we go to Edinburgh. Steve did a really awesome run through yesterday, with a particularly good opera, so I was very proud.

That’s pretty much it really, apart from the fact that Dan, our joyous techie, joined us at our practice on Sunday and the actors played some games with his library of sound effects, we tinkered with the Line of Time, and came up with a whole new kind of audience warm up, which should be really great, but I’m not going to say anything about that now, you’ll have to come and see us in Edinburgh to experience it in person, or simply come and see our

PREVIEW SHOW!* Yup, we got tired of telling our Cambridge based friends that no, we weren’t going to be performing anywhere apart from Edinburgh, and decided to organise a preview. It’s on Sunday (this Sunday, the 16th) at 7.30 in Keynes Hall/Chetwynd Room in King’s. Everyone should come and see it and seize control of the joystick of history.  :)

*My, that was a long sentence. It’s because I’m excited.

Imagine meeting that on a dark night...

I’m Project Steve’s musician, which means playing the keyboard, getting the actors to sing, and improvising operas on the spot. When the actors look all professional playing invisible instruments, that’s me. Me! I’ve been doing this since 2007 when ICE swept up and am starting to worry that I’m forgetting how to read sheet music. Lines and dots, right?

I’m the baby of the group. There’s nearly a decade between me and Dr Wareham, although while he retains startlingly youthful looks, I am prematurely aged from the stress of so much improvised music (see photo) such that he is often mistaken for my younger brother.  

I am deeply, passionately in love with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who has rocked my little piano playing socks since I was about 6 years old. Various attempts have been made to beat this out of me, such as burial alive and exposure to Schoenburg, but to no avail.

I come from the Other Place, or as near to it as makes no difference, in what can only be described as  a small village in Hobbit Country. My feet are in fact preternaturally hairy, which does not affect my musical output in any way.

I can also play other instruments, and sometimes even write music down(!). In (even) younger days I was the drummer in a band. It was called Burn the Barbies. Ah, we were young… My ambition nowadays is to pursue my quest to make louder and louder noises, and learn the organ in order to surprise tourists in Trinity Street with massive and intimidating chords.

Buttons scare me, but I like toggles.

I am renowned in certain circles for being able to provide an ‘excellent sensory experience’ for any occasion (The Cambridge Student, Lent Term 2009). I should clarify that the sensory experience in question is limited to the ears (again, see photo).

So that no one is under the impression that the cast currently consists of Rich Wareham only, I should introduce myself! I’m Laila, aka The Girl, aka the Laitron (increasingly often). 

I’m a bit littler than most of the cast in still being an undergraduate and I can’t therefore boast to have been a part of the Days of Yore and productions such as The Crystal Maze, nor am I a founding member of Improvised Comedy Ents. But I have done some other fun things!

Such as a hoste of plays/pantomimes with the Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society, for whom I’ve written, directed and produced as well. In fact, this Michaelmas all Cambridge-based people can look forward to a CULES play written by myself and Hannah ‘Miss-Hannah-Price-at-the-piano’ Price . In addition to CULES I’ve written and directed a version Alice in Wonderland for my college drama society, acted among others in Troy: The Musical, The Diary of Anne Frank,  The Tale of Lancelot Sebastian von Ludendorff and Lady Windermere’s Fan (which, incidentally, you can listen to here) and did some other stuff to, I’m sure.  When joining Improvised Comedy Ents one inevitably suddenly stars in more shows than there are weeks in the term, quite the change from laboriously rehearsed plays, and I’ve been in more shows with ICE than I can off the top of my head count. The highlight was without a doubt Murder Most Improvised, last year’s Edinburgh show. I promise it’s not because of the bloody murders.

When taking a bit of time off from improv and theatre, I study Classics  and am therefore very much hoping the audience will come prepared with Classical suggestions. Especially of historical events with women in (they seem to be even more rare in history than they are in 1920s murder mysteries!).  I very much hope to be able to portray a Livia, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Helen of Troy, or a Medea in one of the shows. The real struggle though seems to be to get to play these women when certain male cast members get excited…  In my next post I might upload a picture of Tom as Florence Nightingale…!

I just sent the flyer images off to the printers today. Given a following wind and a willing deity, they should arrive at the venue in a few days. For the curious among you, I’ve included a gallery of the flyer images in this post. They are also available on the main An Improvised History of Almost Everything website.

Hello! Hannah here, generator of all noises plinky plonk and Cockney piano. I thought it would be quite jolly to tell you about Steve’s last practice weekend as it appeared from the piano stool.

This wasn't this weekend, but I can't take photos while playing the piano...

So, Stevefolk would be the first to admit that they weren’t great singers. None of them is ever going to perform the Queen of the Night aria to a packed house, unless part of some great sadistic doom plan. One would hope. But the great part of it is that you don’t need to be Pavarotti to do improv singing, and in fact *not* being Pavarotti is a bonus.  One of the great things about working with the folks in Steve is that they’re pretty damn funny whether in or out of tune. No one is ever going to forget Alex’s iconic ‘I’m a Butler’ song from the Murder Most Improvised rehearsals last year. Children as yet unborn are singing it in the womb, despite it not even having a tune.

Having said that about their singing skills, they’ve all come on leaps and bounds, especially the least confident ones. They’re harmonising and everything!  Some highlights of the weekend had to be the closing number of the Robin Hood Opera, ‘You Should Have Left The Friar Alone…’ performed by Rich and Tom and the Socratics and the Stoices [sic] decision to resolve their philosophical differences by making a tiger and a bear fight to the death, all in the medium of song. Operas are pretty hard work; I’m playing continuously for about ten to fifteen minutes (sometimes longer) with everything off the top of my head, trying to watch what the hell the actors are doing on stage - very dangerous just to assume you know what they’re doing because you might look down while they’re nailing the 95 Theses to the church door and next time you look they’re doing something suspicious with mimed haddock - and stop my wrists from atrophying from playing too many tremendous chords.  I’ve been trying to go for a sort of light Mozartian feel to the whole thing, but sometimes only tremendous chords will do.

There is a sense of heady power that comes from sitting at the piano stool. Mwa ha ha ha.  Sometimes it’s very easy to underestimate how much background music can affect the mood of a scene, and it’s been fun for this show coming up with music that adds to the flavour of the time period. Combined with the costumes (which I’m sure Laila will blog about later, there are loads of pictures) it all adds up to a great Instant Historical Era, just add actors. Oh yes, and there’s the power to induce songs in people, and create flashbacks. The cast has learned not to underestimate my love of flashbacks. I’ve been banned from creating second order flashbacks, they make me too unruly.

All in all, it was a really great weekend for the Stevites, and musicwise in particular, and now I’m so excited about the Fringe, I might explode. I’ll let you know how things go!  *Mysterious going off stage twinkly music…*

Last weekend we gathered in Oxford for a practise with Alex, Olaf, Tom and myself (slightly decreased numbers due to weddings or as Rich calls them ‘weedings’ and Miss Price feeling a little under the weather). We were pleasingly productive, working out more details of the format of the show and doing our first uninterrupted full run, with the highlight for me being Tom and Alex as farmers in Roman Britain complaining about the loss of their raspsberries, strawsberries, bluesberries and othersberries. Damn those Romans stealing our sberries.

In addition to this though, we also did a show! New College invited us to do two slots at their Warden’s Leaving Party. Not only did this mean lots of free very very yummy food, but also a chance to perform  for an audience which (thankfully) laughs at your jokes and makes you feel like you’re funny again. Something you can begin to doubt when practicing in small meeting rooms with just the four of you.

The audience was just lovely and very enthusiastic about the show, especially a horde of children who excitedly shouted out suggestions of fruits and animals and when pressed, a planet. Our show is definitely family friendly I realised, and maybe we should actually branch out to improv for kids… Games like double-handed had them screaming with laughter.

I had every intention of taking some pictures of the event, but didn’t get the chance to. Olaf’s camera I believe has one picture of Tom, Alex and Olaf walking away from me on the lawn, which wasn’t really a very exciting picture anyway. So I’ll just post a picture of the lawn we performed on without us and without the party. You’ll have to imagine our hilarity and the scrumptious food yourself.