Poprox Improv is the brain­child of a bunch of Welling­ton the­atre stal­warts: Pip­pa Drake­ford-Croad, Dylan Hut­ton, Austin Har­ri­son, Nina Hogg, Jon­ny Paul & Nino Raphael, and it is a show absolute­ly wor­thy of their tal­ent. Per­formed for the first time this night at Mira­mar’s gor­geous new per­for­mance venue — Roxy Live (a glo­ri­ous new space in the foy­er of the Roxy Cin­e­ma on Park Road), this show is immer­sive, delight­ful and tru­ly the most unhinged improv I’ve seen in a good long while.

(I mean that in a very com­pli­men­ta­ry way.)

A cabaret of the whim­si­cal, the show is bro­ken into sev­er­al games, which I’m pre­sum­ing will change across dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions of the show. Warm­ing us up with a rhyme game (with Nino set­ting the scene on the key­board), we’re encour­aged to boo when some­one mess­es up, but there’s noth­ing at all mali­cious in it. Then Jon­ny plays four scenes with each of the oth­er per­form­ers duck­ing in to play the oth­er char­ac­ter in the scene, there’s a love sto­ry about two film pro­jec­tion­ists, a vig­il for a cat and a frankly hor­ri­fy­ing scene at the den­tist.  The show cul­mi­nates in a pow­er bal­lad rem­i­nisc­ing on what had just hap­pened.

There is a cer­tain kind of joy in see­ing per­form­ers who like each oth­er per­form on stage togeth­er, and that is cer­tain­ly obvi­ous in this piece. There’s a degree of stitch­ing-up, a cer­tain kind of tease, a non­sense and a delight in the uncan­ny that makes the hour and change of this show pass very quick­ly.

This group delights in mis­fir­ings, with bizarre ask-fors tak­en, some ques­tion­able object work and mis­heard audi­ence prompts, but that’s the joy of it all.  Find­ing the awk­ward and absolute­ly pow­er­ing through it is so enjoy­able to watch, and gen­uine­ly quite a skill, and through­out the show I’m fre­quent­ly laugh­ing so hard my chest hurts.

The chem­istry and the impro­vis­ing tal­ent of this group can­not be under­stat­ed. Though there are some chal­leng­ing aspects to per­form­ing in a place like this — size, shape and breadth of the audi­ence are all unusu­al — they take to it incred­i­bly well and pro­vide us with a hilar­i­ous, fan­tas­tic work.

Absolute­ly bloody good, check out the next one next time they’re about, it’ll make your night.

 

For more details about Poprox Improv, hit them up on Face­book.