Improv Insider

Playback Theatre is improvised theatre where audience members share personal stories and actors immediately play back those stories on stage. Playback Theatre is musical, dramatic, creative, insightful and contrary to popular belief, funny. Playback Theatre Sydney actor and trainer Thanassis Boulis talks to us about what it is, how it works, and the differences between […]

The Home Front (formerly “Holding”) is a long form show developed in Canberra by Catherine Crowley and Heidi Silberman, about the lives of the women holding the home front in WWI. Cathy and Heidi talk about: the development of the show; drawing on research and historical materials; paying respect to the characters; and their plans […]

Rue de la Rocket are an artist collective who’ve devised several performance works using improvisation, including their much lauded Sydney Fringe shows Tits Up in 2011, and This is my box in 2012. We talk to members Karena Thomas and Karli Evans about improv, acting, and devising theatre, which if you’re familiar with some of my works, are things very […]

What started out as an interview with Cale Bain, this year’s Cranston Cup Director, about his vision for this year’s season, turned into a history of the Cranston and all it’s quirkiness, with Cale and Impro Australia’s Artistic Director Marko Mustac. Oh, and we find out if Cale has a vision. The Cranston Cup is […]

One of Sydney’s more prolific producers of improv comedy, this episode we chat with John Knowles about IMPROZAC, the 1990s show he created with Adam Gelin. John and I have been trying to make this happen for almost a year now, and I think it’s turned out as a pretty good tribute to the show […]

Not so much an interview, but a group chat with Pink Ladies. While I did have a quite structured list of questions, and had only planned to raise gender at a certain point, it seems you just can’t ignore what is still unfortunately the elephant in the room, and thus the issue of it being […]

Our interview with Lisa Ricketts, a professional improvisor and one of Sydney’s favourite players, chatting about how to get cast in the Sydney scene (kind of), female improvisors, Explosive Minds, improv festivals, growing balls, and breaking into the U.S. You can visit Lisa’s blog at Improv Bootcamp. Excuse the odd wind effect, I left my […]

Chicago and New York improvisor Ed Illades was visiting Sydney for a few months for personal reasons, so we dragged him into a series of workshops and an interview, chatting about Chicago, sketch vs improv, being in the moment, and short form vs long form. We’ve also taken the leap to stereo and full length […]

Here’s part 2 of our interview with Peter Lead, continuing with Peter’s production history, and finally ending with a few production tips, the original point of the interview. Episode2.mp3 (27 MB) Recorded 22nd January 2010.

Our first episode is part 1 of our interview with Peter Lead, which was going to be about producing your own improv show, the tricks and the traps, but instead turned into a history of Peter’s work and the Sydney improv scene. Episode1.mp3 (14 MB) Apologies for the embedded field recording, we did the interview […]