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Chicago City Limits
The open stage contained only chairs and a piano. As the stage lights shone, Travis Ploeger entered, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, and stepped behind a keyboard. The fun began as he played a bad version of “Chopsticks,” then flowed into a more complicated piece.
As with most improvisational comedy, the show was very audience-oriented; the audience was in for a lot of musical entertainment. Ploeger improvised on the piano while other performers strutted their stuff.
Moving right along, the cast went into scene improv. The audience was asked to give a song that the scene could be based on. “Baby Got Back” was the choice. The cast members performed the scene, only to be rewound back, literally. Once they had rewound themselves through the scene they had just performed, they performed it a different way, including Shakespeare style, a sultry rendition of Tennessee Williams and a classic horror scene. Ploeger provided the mood for each different scene with appropriate musical accompaniment, including the theme music from “Psycho” during the horror scene.
The performers did not restrict themselves to isolated scenes. Several times during the show, the cast members performed full-blown songs, stories and musicals. At one point the actors asked the audience for a phrase to base a skit off of, and they wound up with the phrase, “I love IHOP.”
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