What is a Mr. Friskett show?
We want to find new ways to do old things. We're trying to take improv and theater and performance art that has fallen into a groove and start questioning, reexamining and reinventing it to give it some excitement and life again. Our goal with our shows and projects is to entertain our audience a variety of experiences. We feel we've succeeded when everybody leaves happy, but where most people have a completely different "favorite part" of our show. We try very hard to take the explaination out of improv and getting right to the entertainment, trusting that the audience will enjoy finding the rules or formulas themselves as they watch, but not taking the audience for granted or detaching from their entertainment to create art for art's sake. We take Vaudeville as a broad template: theater that dresses up and plays professionally, but not haughtily, and with the goal of entertaining their audience at all cost with everything they're good at: hilighting specialties and variety, big acts and solos, longer pieces and short bits.
What is improv?
Every group that performs as an improv troupe has their own take on this definition. For us, improv is exploration: going onto the stage with a set of tools to find something new. We work to craft the tools that make this exploration more entertaining for the audience and which inspire new and more exciting choices from our performers by deconstructing popular improv games and forms, reinterpreting constructs and questioning rules. We try to understand why things work and why they don't and how they could. All that improv has to be to be considered improv is unscripted. We are working to find new ways to make unscripted theater funny, exciting, interesting and, above all, entertaining.