Larry Rosen is teaching Musical Improv Levels 1 and 2 at The Peoples Improv Theater in New York. He has many years of experience and a great reputation. He attended a signing event that I did at the Drama Book Shop several years ago
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a Second City music director? If you think playing the piano, writing and teaching songs, underscoring scenes, and improvising music sounds like fun (it is), you might make a great music director.
SHOWSTOPPER! is a completely improvised musical in an exciting and innovative new format: a writer has just one hour to create a hit show with the help of the audience! Each night the crowd provides the actors and musicians with titles, themes and ideas from which they perform an entirely made-up musical.
HNR was born from a shadowy tryst in the sordid summer of 2006, and has expanded to two separate casts that perform regularly in the Los Angeles, CA and Denver, Co areas. And we would love to perform for you. And that means exactly what you think it means.
This performance is perfect. Jenny applies every trick in the book to improvise a funny song, and takes complete possession of the audience. She begins with “Won’t you be my ?” and here comes the romantic power ballad.
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INTERVIEWS with musical improv artists (beginners, pros, celebs … performers and musical accompanists.
ARTICLES about different aspects of musical improv, [...]
This performance is perfect. Jenny applies every trick in the book to improvise a funny song, and takes complete possession of the audience. She begins with “Won’t you be my ?” and here comes the romantic power ballad.
This is an example of excitingly organic musical improv expertly tempered with solid technique to create a well-organized, theatrical piece. The sections are very clear:
You need something to sing about, something to launch a song. The audience is going to give it to you. Here are sample question you can use to get suggestions from them:
Imagine a train coming into the station-the engine is pulling a lot of cars, a lot of weight. It takes awhile for the train to come to a halt; it has to “start stopping” a certain amount of time before it actually does. This is analogous to the ending of a song. In order to bring a song comfortably and satisfyingly to a close, we need to do it gradually.
