Some Enchanted Evening

A musical created from audience suggestions. Just hope everyone makes it out alive.

by Emily Currier

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Published: May 12, 2010

Katherine Fritz THE SOUND OF MUSIC: The Philadelphia Joke Initiative will make up music, lyrics and jokes in Rodgers and Hammerstein are Dead, featuring (from left) Joe Sabatino, Olwyn Conway, Kristen Schier, Olivia R. Brubaker, Kelly Vrooman and more.

[ improvisational jazz hands! ]

Caution: Rodgers and Hammerstein are Dead could kill. That's an exaggeration. But there is peril aplenty in staging a full-length improv musical. "The performances are equally as dangerous and unpredictable as a trapeze act. We're never entirely sure what's going to happen," says director Jason Stockdale. "There is risk involved on a nightly basis."

In this live, completely on-the-spot musical, the comedians, along with pianist Joe Gribbin, will come up with songs based on an audience member's suggestions for a fantastical location or imagined title. Emulating the creators of beloved musicals such as Oklahoma!, South Pacific and The Sound of Music, the performances will revolve around a young couple as they fall in love, are torn apart and are then brought back together to live happily ever after. Every night will be an entirely different play that only one specific audience will ever witness.

Since November, the idea of marrying improv and musical theater had kicked around in the minds of Stockdale and artistic director Alexis Simpson. When a group of committed, and possibly foolhardy, people came together, they began a rigorous rehearsal schedule to build an understanding of musical structures as well as, most importantly, a sense of trust.

Crewed by a group of local comedy favorites from ComedySportz and The N Crowd, the show brings improv comedy into a new arena — one with footlights and costumes — and out of the makeshift-venue ghetto in which improv groups normally dwell. In a bar, Stockdale says, "You get up in the corner in T-shirt and jeans and do it real quick, down and dirty." By raising the production values, Philadelphia Joke Initiative (PJI), which is producing R&HAD, hopes to bring in a more diverse crowd, from improv-groupies to more classic theater-goers.

Committed to "comedy advocacy," PJI brings attention to the local comedy scene, helps comedians get paid and is responsible for slotting routines by local comedians into breaks during Rodgers and Hammerstein. PJI produced its first full-length improv piece in January, Cecily and Gwendolyn's Fantastical Balloon Ride, which sent two Victorian women through time in a hot-air balloon.

The main thing PJI needs to pull off this daring feat, though, are audience members with imaginations to challenge the comedians. Maybe a nun-in-training who falls in love with a stern Austrian captain with a large, musically gifted family?

(emily.currier@citypaper.net)

Rodgers and Hammerstein are Dead | Every Thu.-Sat. through May 29, 8 p.m.; Sun., May 16 and 23, 7 p.m.; $12-$20, The Latvian Society, 531 N. Seventh St., 215-821-8754, contactpji.com

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