A high-powered finish for 2024’s New Zealand Improv Festival was the ensemble closing show This Might Get Weird. 

For the last few years of the fest, it’s been closed with a head-to-head battle called NZ vs the World, where a team of improvisers from Aotearoa faces off against a team of improvisers pulled from the festival’s large international performer base. But this year the fest has turned things on its head with a two act show called This Might Get Weird (concept originating from Tāmaki Makarau improv company Paper Goat).

The mood is raucous in BATS Theatre’s The Stage with a completely packed house. A group of three musicians (Glenn Seaby, Ollie Howlett and Criss Grueber) play guitars and banjos at the side of the stage.

We’re invited into the space by our host for the evening, Paper Goat’s Steven Lyons, who tells us that tonight’s show takes place in two parts. In the first act, four contestants will vie for our applause via improv games: festival co-directors Jim Fishwick and Matt Powell, local improviser Mamaeroa (Mo) Munn and Melbourne’s Jaklene Vukasinovic. The winner will direct the ensemble – seven performers sitting at the back of the stage – Viki Moananu, Acacia King, Jeff Mesina, Clara Andrade Gomes, Caitlin Penhey, Marea Colombo and Curtis Shipley – plus the other directors, in an explosive finale during act two.

Lyons explains the show’s Tinder-inspired conceit: if we like the director running each game, we’ll say “Like” with a thumbs up; if we don’t, we’ll say “Swipe” and we’ll swipe them away. And now we’re off to the races with our four directors telling a story sentence by sentence, to decide who gets to show off their directorial talent first. 

The winner is called and we roll into a series of fast-paced improvised scenes. In total, directors have seven minutes each – over up to four scenes – to strut their stuff, directing their fellow competitors.

Jim and Jak have a date at J&Ms, on Courtenay Place, culminating in the lights coming up as they stare out at the audience – cast as the folk clubbing on Courtenay Place – and admire us. “Oh, they’re all vomiting,” Jim says. Great start, though not altogether untrue.

Jak directs a horror scene featuring Mo, a tied-up Matt, and alligators performed by the audience. Doctors who are worms, a smooch with a horse’s head, deeply-pointed musical numbers and sneaky moments of sabotage roll us through a delightful and delirious Act One that leaves the entire audience screaming with laughter.

After the final scene – Matt playing a mayor who is increasingly aware he doesn’t know what event he’s giving a speech to – Jim is crowned the winner, and we all take a ten minute interval to allow the director some cast-wrangling time, before returning to the theatre once more.

Jim sets the scene. Tonight, their directing number is a slightly-shortened version of Rik Brown’s improv format Plot Mess,where the narrative is “like spaghetti”. As the director, Jim will take control of the narrative, by telling us where the characters are, who is present, and sometimes what they’re doing.

They place us in a royal court, where the Royal Coin and the War Advisor are giving some news to the Queen. “The donkeys are rioting again!” they declare – at which the Queen reminds them all of their new stock of military arsenal. The donkeys suddenly stop rioting.

Jim leads us and the ensemble masterfully through a variety of scenes. All of the queens’ foreign heads of state friends are sleeping with each other, The Royal Coin grows up and turns into the Royal (Bit)Coin, the donkeys hatch a plan to take over the castle, and a crab and a clam embrace under the sea. Somewhere under it all there’s a parable about love – maybe. The organised chaos concludes with a wedding between the crab and the clam.

Every time I see an improv show with this many moving parts I am constantly in awe of how well they pull together in the end. This is a deeply complex show with a complicated format, and approximately sixteen people (including musicians and operator) to wrangle in 90 minutes, and yet – it works!

It is the improv talent of the cast and crew that makes a piece of this calibre so good; a truly inspired night out that delights and amuses the entire audience. This Might Get Weird is a breath of fresh air in terms of closing show formats, with ample opportunity for every cast member to strut their stuff across multiple characters and through the lens of performance, music and dance. 

I certainly hope the festival does get weird when it returns in 2025, because among improv weirdness is where the most beautiful scenes lie. I’m pleased and proud that I managed to get a seat to last night’s show.

Congrats to the NZ Improv Festival for another wonderful year!

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