It was really weird, I was more nervous for that show with no audience or anybody than the first show. I remember that first full dress rehearsal of the show was the most nervous I've ever been through the entire duration of the tour. And then we went to Oklahoma, for the first rehearsal and we got on stage with Swani, who is the director of the show. So it was all written on paper and we had an outline of what we wanted to do and how we wanted the show to be. And up until the first rehearsal, we hadn't done the tour at all. Because the first run we did in June was the practice run of the tour. But we're still fine-tuning it and adding pieces that we think are fun and that we think the audience will like.Įthan: It's interesting to think back to when we first started planning out the tour. Between the practice tour and the last tour we changed things up a bit, and this tour we added a new show and a really impressive costume set. Wade: Yeah, and even now the show is still evolving. So essentially you took all the best ideas you had that were also the lightest and easiest to take on tour and that kinda made up the whole show? When we first started on like a Monday, we were all just sitting around after the planning process like, "…okay, four more days, we think we might call it the 'You're Welcome Tour.' Good start." And then by Friday, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do and it was amazing how quickly it came together as we all really wanted this to succeed. And it just came together throughout the week. We had this big whiteboard where we could write things like what are things we could do with the audience and we'd just look at them and say, "that's probably doable, but that would take a lot of props and a lot of busses for just that one setup." And the process of elimination, we'd take one idea and we'd all kind of contribute why yes or why no on something and limited it down from there. We'd do improv every morning back in March and April when we'd get together, then we'd get together for three or four hours in the afternoon and just spitball ideas. Wade: We'd have a whiteboard that we'd access every day when we were planning this. Whereas long-form can take a long time to build up and a whole set of characters can come out of it. Short-form is pre-structured rules that the audience can easily understand and are a little bit easier for improvisers to get into the meat of stuff. There's long-form and short-form, and usually, long-form is a complex process about building a narrative out of one word or a single idea. So we kind of fell back on games that are tried-and-true staples of improv, short-form comedies especially. It was one of those ideas that sounded good on paper, but as soon as we tried it with Rachel, we saw just how incredibly flawed it was and it didn't go very smoothly. And then I would narrate it out and improvisers would go on stage and act it out. They get the story, they get the characters, the get the location, they get what our objective is. We were going to do this storytelling style thing, where we were going to get the audience to come up with this Mad Libs-style story. Mark: The first Idea actually was something that didn't make it past the planning stages. What was the first game you guys came up with? It got really complicated because "A Date With Markiplier" came out a few months before we had this planning, and that's what kind of spurned the choose-your-own-adventure style that we ended up trying to do and thin kind of having to reboot and come up with an overarching concept of where we still had the idea of a through-thread while keeping the improv buts and those sorts of things intact. So we ran into the speed bump of we can only script so much and memorize it when we're planning to go out in June. Tyler: I think time really played into that because we all have our own things going on. We want to do improv comedy, how do we structure that so it's not just 90 minutes of us trying to do improv comedy? And then we really just grew the first game idea which spawned the first bit of structure, and it was like, anything you got, throw it out there. So it was like "Okay, now we have nothing. I don't remember how it all collectively played out, but at some point, we were like, "I don't know if this idea is working." There were a couple of nights where we started talking about how this is way more complicated than we have the talent or knowledge about production to pull off. I think it started with having an idea for a show where it was choose-your-own-adventure sort of thing that he envisioned and started working on that. How did you end up deciding on a combination of pre-planned bits and improv?īob: That process was kind of interesting because the big week where we went out and did improv and took intensive improv classes together and learned how to work as a group and try to work with Swani in putting together an actual plan for the show.
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