The “make-em-up specialists” from Crush Improv, an Ottawa-based improvisation troupe, celebrated their third anniversary at The Gladstone Theatre Dec. 3 and 4.
The anniversary performance featured Crush’s Brad MacNeil, AL Connors and Cari Leslie, and two other Canadian improv groups, the Toronto-based Sex T-Rex and Montreal’s Uncalled For.
Crush, who started performing in the fall of 2007, have gained a large and loyal fan following. Last year, the troupe also started working with the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama, teaching performance improvisation.
Walking into Crush’s show Dec. 3, the audience was filled with excited chatter in anticipation of the unscripted hilarity to come. The stage was set with simple theatre blocks and a keyboard. Those blocks would later be transformed into a seat in the NASA control room, the base of a statue and many other settings decided off-the-cuff of the performers’ heads.
In the first half of Friday’s show, Sex T-Rex and Uncalled For competed against each other. They played games such as “Switch-O-Change-O,” which involved two players from each team switching roles in a scene on MacNeil’s call. With the audience’s suggestion of “toaster and toast” as a relationship, the players developed the scene, ending when the toaster said to the toast “All right, get in here!”
Uncalled For worked with the audience’s suggestion of “mojo” as a theme in the second half, where they were joined by the players from Crush. The performers morphed into a plethora of characters such as musicians, gurus, RoboCops, therapists and gossiping principals. The scene ended with the musician telling a woman “Your face says young, but your hips say experienced.”
Sex T-Rex followed with a vulgar re-enactment of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, complete with a facetious E.T., extremely feminine Elliott and two flippant government officials.
The final game brought the three troupes together, shooting the combined hilarity factor off the charts and proving that true improvisers are willing to do anything for a laugh.