Alistair Cook and other improvisers reminisced about their favourite Christmas movies when Instant Theatre was dreaming up a holiday improv show.
"A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story,” said Cook, the soon to be 20-year-old company’s artistic director. “But then we found that everybody loved Die Hard.”
That’s how the company’s Christmas baby, The 12 Days of Kickin’ Ass: A Blockbuster Improvised Holiday Action Adventure, was born. The show, which runs Dec. 19 to 21 at the Havana Theatre, mashes cherished Christmas flicks with classic action films.
Improviser Warren Bates, who every Christmas watches the Bruce Willis movie with his dad, will take on the John McClane lone wolf-type character while another player takes on Ebenezer Scrooge.
“And by the end of our hour-and-a-half of improvising scenes and following the classic Die Hard formula, but with suggestions from the audience, we will find ourselves beating the terrorists and saving Christmas,” Cook said.
For those hazy on what the “pentology” is about, Cook reminds that McClane is a man who’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time and must overcome insurmountable odds to save the day.
In the first Die Hard, McClane visits his estranged wife in L.A. on Christmas Eve when German terrorists take her office tower hostage. In the second Die Hard, he drives his wife to the airport, which is taken over by rogue military officials. The third sees terrorists take over New York City.
“The fourth and fifth I’m not talking about because they’re sort of the ugly cousins of the series,” Cook said.
Instant Theatre’s improvisers have rehearsed a skeleton of a show that will twist and bend based on audience suggestions.
“With any genre, we expect a certain thing,” Cook said. “When we see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, we expect him to kick down a door, shoot a person and say something hilarious... It’s just this time, he’s on a boat or whatever the suggestion is from the audience.”
They’ve rehearsed versions where the Scrooge character heads a salmon hatchery empire, a slew of bong stores, a ski hill and a cruise ship.
“It’s an antidote to all of the other Christmas [fare] out there,” Cook said.
Post Kickin’ Ass, Cook is looking forward to producing the Vancouver Sketch Comedy Festival, Jan. 23 to 25, which will bring about 20 local and international sketch groups to Granville Island.
In February, Instant Theatre is mounting an improvised dystopian rock musical.
“In a dystopian wasteland, people will find love and probably battle off cannibals, all in song,” Cook said.
March brings a remount of a show award-winning actor and comedian Ryan Beil performed in 2006, Professor Mendelson and His Mind. One act challenges the cast to complete a play with only the first five pages written. Bates stars as Mendelson, who must piece together the fragments of his life while writing his memoirs, with chapter headings from the audience, in the other act.
Instant Theatre also stages improv battles every Sunday night at the Havana Theatre.
The 12 Days of Kickin' Ass
Dec. 19 to 21, 8 p.m. at Havana Theatre
1212 Commercial Dr.
instanttheatre.com
