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“YOU DID WHAAAAAT?”

This was the sentence with which the show started. It was Kitty and the Bee, a team from Toronto who came for the yearly festival. The audience was asked to give a sentence that they could develop on. As you have guessed “you did what?!” was the chosen one and this creative duo told the tale of IKEA’s darkest secrets.

Next on stage was Easy Action, they are known in our city for their love of samurai and pirate scenes and other crazy developments. Brent went on stage questioning audience’s ability of smart theme suggestions (as a part of the improv of course, don’t you worry no one will hold you responsible for failure to instantly come up with witty suggestions), and the audience did not disappoint – the theme of this show was “another one bites the dust”.

As the lights went off and then went back on we were introduced to two characters, a drug abusing medical doctor uncle and his nephew with a broken leg. The beauty of IMPROV theater is that you will never guess what you will hear, even from the moment the team takes a suggestion from the audience, where they go next and how they will develop their characters and the stories they find themselves in is as unpredictable and creative as the forces of nature (I know, what a beautiful and unrelated comparison, right?).

So to give you a little recap and a slight idea of what comedy improv is, here is a little of Easy Action in Action:

Uncle: Well yeah your leg is broken…
Nephew: So what should I do?
U: You should walk it off son!
N: But…
U: Oh and take this, it will help.
N: But these are drugs!
U: These are not JUST drugs, this is the best shit on the market son!

So this is how it started, or at least as close as I could remember it. After taking the “best shit on the market” those two went to a bar. The boy with a broken leg dealt with his pain by going home with a vulnerable and very secretive woman from the bar (performed by Brent). With a number of unexpected plot turns the audience was introduced to a pirate from the “isle of suicidal drugs” whose mission in life was to bring those drugs on the market. I could go on and on about the story but as I mentioned before, improv is something you really must see it with your own eyes.

The last team on stage was a duo from Toronto called K$M, Kirsten Rasmussen (former MONTREAL IMPROV director and co-founder) and Matt Folliott, both of whom are the nominees for the best female and male improvisers. This very much anticipated duo continuously made the audience cry from laughter. K$M developed on the subject of a well known combination of words: the Groundhog Day, replaying the same scenario in a number of ways and a number of characters, always different but constantly hilarious, one better than the other.

So to conclude, if you havn’t seen any of this year’s MPROV festival performances, you are not a lost cause just yet because the show must go on and it will this coming weekend. Make sure you show up early because the tickets sell out very fast.

MPROV festival is happening from Sep 30 – Oct 11 , 2014, $6 – 12$. Find out times and get tickets HERE