Laughing the night away with Santa Clarita Improv
Improvisation brings humor to the first Center Stage performance of the summer
- posted: 24 Apr 2007
- scrollarts@byui.edu
Nick Walker / Scroll
Well before show time on Saturday night, the performance was sold out. Lincoln Hoppe, Kirby Heyborne, Kelly Lohman and Corbin Allred performed sound check by making up a musical about a city called “Fat Town” and a young man who made his living selling apples.
Hoppe, Heyborne, Lohman and Allred, all of Los Angeles, Calif., are the members of Santa Clarita Improv, which performed at BYU‑Idaho in the Kirkham Auditorium April 20 and 21.
Santa Clarita Improv is the brainchild of Heyborne and Hoppe, who met on the set of The Singles Ward.
“We were planning on doing something up to no good. This is how we decided to get our revenge on the world — by making them laugh,” said Hoppe.
Santa Clarita Improv has been together a little over a year. The group relies solely on improvisation, a style of acting in which the performers come up with the actions and dialogue spontaneously.
“We make it up. Yes, sometimes it’s painfully obvious because it’s not going so well, [but] sometimes it comes together really nicely. We probably had a mixture of both last night,” Heyborne said before Saturday’s performance.
The group performed a series of improvisational skits, asking audience members for ideas that could be implemented into the skits, including suggestions of favorite foods and movies.
“I heard a few rated-R ones [movies] out there. You may want to think about that tomorrow,” Hoppe said during Saturday night’s show.
In Santa Clarita Improv’s first skit, the actors created a scene revolving around cereal. At first the actors acted out the scene normally, but then used audience suggestions to add emotion, accents and singing styles to their characters.
By the last scene of this first skit, Lohman portrayed a jealous, hip-hopping Brazilian.
“I love it. [Improv] is my favorite thing to do. This is the first time I’ve really had an outlet for that,” Lohman said.
Lohman, a native of Seattle, Wash., is the only female member of Santa Clarita Improv. “Kelly is the honey that holds the group together,” Allred said.
In the next game, audience members wrote down random quotes and actions and laid them across the stage. The four actors performed each scene by periodically picking up the slips of paper and incorporating them into their role-play. One scene portrayed a young man competing with his boss for the help of a history tutor—in a bathroom stall.
The performers portrayed astronauts in another skit and had to put a marshmallow in their mouth every time they made audience members laugh.
“I loved the astronauts, especially Lincoln,” said Carolyn Erwin, a sophomore from Idaho Falls. “Every single thing he said I just couldn’t stop laughing at, and he had to keep putting marshmallows in his mouth. I thought it was really funny.”
The second half of Saturday’s performance was a spontaneous musical centered around a forest ranger, an idea inspired by one audience member’s childhood dream of working in the wild.
“I thought they were really good at doing improv, coming up with entire plays just off the tops of their heads,” Erwin said.
This was the group’s first time performing in Rexburg. “We had a fantastic audience. They were playful, fun and involved,” Hoppe said. 
