The Knightly News

Ten minutes after seven o’clock, members of North’s Improv Club entered with an assortment of odd instruments, introducing themselves to the packed UDH with a tune.  On May 9, the Improv Club hosted its second show of the year, entertaining the crowd with quick wit and quirky antics.

The show progressed with a series of games, each featuring an assortment of club members.  In almost every game, the troupe asked the audience for ideas regarding characters, locations and situations, and eventually chose the most outrageous and comical scenarios to improvise.  Since audience participation is a major component of improvisation, the particularly large audience that night drove show’s success.  “The audience was a lot bigger and more responsive than I expected it to be, which always works out well because the audience gives us 50% of our energy during the show,” senior president Adam Kercheval said.

Highlights included the game “Freeze,” which involved some members acting out a scene and others “freezing” the scene to jump in as replacements and begin a new scene with the same pose.  The “Scenes from a Hat” game, in which the improvers individually acted out scenes that the audience concocted, also provoked much laughter.

Intermission brought both suspense and further amusement when the club spun a homemade wheel to determine which lucky male member would get the opportunity to have his leg waxed.  As fate would have it, the arrow landed on the “All” space, so each of the boys swallowed his pride and had a section of his leg hair waxed off by one of the female Improv members.  The wheel spin was lucky for entertainment purposes but not so much for the boys themselves.  “The entire audience was laughing and recording,” junior Nadia Nidam said.

In preparation for the show, Improv Club met during lunch and afterschool for two hours each day the week prior to the show to run through the games and become more familiar with one another, but as the club’s name implies, the acting was entirely improvised and spontaneous.  This makes the show more challenging, but the Improvers were satisfied with their performance.  “We have grown so much as a club since the winter show, and we were all a lot more comfortable around each other, and I think that showed,” senior memberKerri Devlin said.

As a final send-off to the club’s senior members, the show concluded with “Tell-it-All Pocket Lines,” in which underclassmen had to incorporate lines pre-written by the seniors into their scene.  The club is losing five members next year, but those remaining are ready to continue improvising and also to welcome new recruits selected during the week of May 26.  “I’m really excited to see what these new beginnings could bring for the Improv Club,” sophomore member Julie Sugar said.

Besides the night’s entertainment, the club also managed to raise around $130 for Team Brotherly Love, a charity dedicated to fighting juvenile Type-I Diabetes.  The club looks forward to more successful shows in the future, and a possible incorporation of new games.  As for future intermission entertainment, Kercheval said, “Maybe next year we should do branding or something.”