Clue (part 1)

Rogue Two is not done! We're doing the thing where we interrupt a long movie with a short one. I'll let you in on a little secret, whenever we've done that it has been due to scheduling. It's happened two or three times before and in every case I've resisted and fought hard to try to finish the movie we're on. Now I've kind of come to embrace it; our movies can get rather long and having a little pallet cleanser is actually nice. I guess at first I thought it would break the format or kill the momentum, but now I appreciate it can give us a little genre mix-up when we most need it.

Anyway, really enjoyed playing Clue. Love Lisa's take on it. It's always really difficult to redo a movie when we lose it for technical issues. It happened to us once before with Winnie the Pooh, which was completely wrapped when we lost it (although it was a one parter, so it was only really a session we were down. In the case of Winnie the Pooh, it was really heartbreaking because I absolutely adored the story we ended up with in the first take. It was sweet and melancholy and boisterous, and while I'm very proud of the episode we put out, it has much more of a cynical vein running through it. While we're theoretically trying to make an audience laugh who hasn't heard the first take, all we can really do is make the people in the room laugh, and they all heard the first version. So I think you tend towards humor with a little more claws out. I can only really speak to my own experience, but for instance, in the first Pooh, I was actually cast as Tigger and me taking over Eeyore was a spur-of-the-moment NPC grab. Which made my dark dead-pan as Eeyore funny because it was a surprise. The second time through everyone knew it was coming, so I felt an instinctive need to up-the-ante. Comedy is inherently about making people laugh, and so you can only really play to the people in the room.

And that's why I think it's so much easier to keep the live-show fresh. Although we haven't done it enough times for it to get stale, we have done the same Escape-From-The-Death-Star sequence in different venues. And it's not like we repeat any jokes, or the explore the same physical space: Every time is a completely new show. But we're not worried about repeating ourselves. We don't feel the instinctive need to "mix-it-up", because we feel the audience's energy so much more strongly than each other. It becomes very easy to stay in the present, without worrying about what happened last time.

Clue on the other hand felt better the second time, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. We'd only recorded about a session and a half, but I thought it was dynamite. I was really sad to learn we'd lost it and needed to start again. Lisa seemed glad at a second shot, and I was puzzled why, as I thought she'd nailed it, although, since it's a movie with sidebars, I didn't have a full view of the story. Perhaps the way it had broken in the behind-the-scenes mechanics was less fun than it could be? But I thought it would be difficult to jump back to the beginning, and instead it felt oddly easy. It may just be because, unlike Winnie the Pooh, Clue's tone is already biting and sarcastic, so pushing us farther in that direction was not a bad thing. In any case, I thought everyone seemed a little more at home in these characters and how to play off each other.

Alrighty. Clue is a three-parter. And then we'll head back to the world of Rogue Two. Then . . . 

gq