Peterborough has had a long love affair with improv comedy, and local actress and radio personality Linda Kash is raising the bar in our community for this unique form of comedy.
With her monthly improv nights at The Venue in downtown Peterborough, Linda is introducing big-city talent to the small-city stage in a series of special dinner theatre performances.
The next show on Thursday, October 16th will prove to be a very special one indeed. A veteran of The Second City stage, Linda is bringing some of her fellow performers from her early days doing improv in Toronto for a special reunion full of food, laughter, and fun.
“I am so excited about this show,” Linda tells me over the telephone, on her way to teach an improv workshop at Bartlett Lodge in Algonquin Park. “I am so lucky to get performers of this calibre to come to Peterborough. It’s a reunion that we are all excited about.”
Joining Linda on stage will be local favourite Danny Bronson along with Toronto-based professionals Jack Mosshammer, Maria Corell, and Teresa Pavlinek, as well as Lisa Merchant.
Friends from their days performing together at The Second City, the performers have been cultivating the craft of improv for over three decades.
“The thing about my friends and improv is that we’ve found the fountain of youth, where you devote yourself to the craft of being playful”, Linda explains. “When I think back that it’s been over thirty years, I can’t believe it — because I feel like I just started.”
Linda teamed up with The Venue this past August with a goal to present a high-quality improv dinner show. The first show included a special appearance by improv legend and television star Colin Mochrie. That show was a huge success, which prompted Linda and The Venue to make it an ongoing monthly event.
“I am so thankful to The Venue,” Linda says. “I get to offer a dinner in a really great setting and then we come up with some Second City style games.”
The dinner offered by The Venue is prepared by award-winning Chef Kyle Guerin, who Linda praises.
Besides working with Linda at The Second City, actresses Teresa Pavlinek and Lisa Merchant were performers on Linda’s television series Go Girl!, which she produced with Steve “Red Green” Smith in the 1990s for The W Network.
When I speak with Teresa on the phone, she tells me the connection between the performers at the October show runs much deeper.
“We used to do a show at The Second City small stage in Toronto called the Alumni Café,” Teresa recalls. “That’s where Linda, Lisa, Jack, and me started improvising together. We don’t get to do that anymore, so this is a great opportunity to reunite and rekindle that connection on stage.”
Coming to Peterborough to do a show also has special significance for Teresa, because she has roots here.
“I’m adopted and thirteen years ago I found my birth family — and they all live in Peterborough,” Teresa explains. “They’re coming to the show.”
She also discovered that she had an unexpected connection with her birth mother.
“When I met her, I was on The Sean Cullen Show,” she recalls. “She was telling me about her life and said ‘I was an actress and I was in community theatre with this actor named Sean Cullen. I don’t know if you would know him.’ I said ‘I’m on his TV show!’ It’s a very strange small world.”
“It’s completely off the cuff,” Teresa says. “We get suggestions from the audience and then we come up with ideas from the suggestions. We don’t prepare anything. We can’t. You can tell when people come in with an agenda. When it’s prepared, it looks forced.”
When asked about the art of improv and what differentiates good improv from bad, both Teresa and Linda offer different points of view. Linda talks about the relationship between the performer and the audience.
“I really feel that if you are doing improv for performance, you must respect the fact that you can’t put the audience through too much torture to get to the goal,” she says. “It’s very important to be concise. There’s a certain economy that’s required because things can’t last too long.”
Teresa talks about the importance of respecting the performers with whom you’re improvising.
“Improv is different from sketch comedy,” she says. “With sketch, you can go out and be funny and stand out yourself. Improv is about the other person. A lot of improv performers make the mistake of making it about themselves and that’s when improv goes bad. Often people don’t have that skill down and they just try to showcase themselves. Improv is really about making the scene better and performing well with your partner.”
Linda knows Peterborough has a thirst for improv and she promises that this show, filled with seasoned professional big-city talent, will be some of the best improv Peterborough has ever seen.
“The people that I’m bringing on stage are veterans who have put their ten thousand hours into it,” she explains. “It’s more than a hobby for them — it’s what they do for a living. They don’t do anything else. They don’t have a day job — this is their day job.”
Tickets for the October 16th show are $55 per person, which includes appetizers, dinner and desserts prepared by Chef Kyle Guerin of The Venue and Dolcé Vita. Future performances are scheduled for November 20th, December 18th, January 15th, and February 19th. Visit www.venueptbo.com for more information and to order tickets.
