The Improv Centre turns February into a month of romance and giggles
Valentine’s Day–themed programming proves how love and laughter go hand in hand
Allen Morrison. Photo courtesy TIC
The Improv Centre presents a month of romance-themed shows throughout February, including Date Night (Thursdays at 7:30 pm); Single, Not Single (Fridays and Saturdays at 9:30 pm); Kiss and Tell (February 14 at 7:30 pm); and Happy Un-Valentine's Day (February 15 at 7:30 pm)
THEY SAY THAT laughter is the best medicine. And while that is admittedly something of a cliché, there’s a lot of truth in it. The Mayo Clinic, for example, lists a number of positive outcomes that may come from laughing, including increased oxygen intake, muscle relaxation, pain relief, and an improved immune system.
It also turns out that giggling alongside someone can help you bond with them—and maybe even fall in love. According to a study conducted at the University of Kansas (the results of which were published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology), “shared laughter might be a pathway toward developing a more long-lasting relationship.”
Allen Morrison gets it. The improv-comedy veteran created the format for the Improv Centre’s Valentine’s Day production, Kiss and Tell, which is just one part of a whole slate of romance-themed shows the ensemble will perform throughout February. In a telephone interview with Stir, Morrison says he has seen for himself that love and laughter often go hand-in-hand.
“In my time at the Improv Centre—and I’ve been there for a number of years now—I’ve been involved in four proposals on-stage,” he says. “People will contact us before time and say ‘Hey, I’m really looking forward to proposing to my partner here on this night; would you guys be able to help us make that possible? And every single time, it’s absolutely exciting.”
Part of the thrill, from the audience’s perspective, is the suspense. Will it be a yes or a no? Morrison admits that the Improv Centre only gives the go-ahead to on-stage proposals that are almost certain to have a happy outcome. However, he says, there is still a palpable buzz each time it happens.
“Often we’ll save it until the last scene of the night,” he notes. “It will often be a scene where we’ll find a reason to bring the couple on-stage for something, and we’ll actually have them performing in the show in some capacity. Then the proposal will happen, and it’s this electric moment that you get in the theatre where the audience starts to clue in that, wait a second, something different is happening here. We’re watching a live show, but this is another level of live that we’re witnessing here.”
Morrison describes Kiss and Tell as a game show akin to The Newlywed Game, designed to test how well romantic partners truly know one another. Three real-life couples compete, and the victorious pair wins the honour of having a musical number dedicated to one of their memorable moments, generally their first date or first kiss.
Single, Not Single looks at the ups and downs of relationships; Date Night celebrates everything from first dates to anniversaries and everything in between; and Happy Un-Valentine’s Day is an unromantic exploration of everything people hate about the holiday.
With regards to Kiss and Tell, Date Night, and the other February shows, the Improv Centre cautions that “Some material may not be suitable for some audiences.” In spite of that, Morrison offers assurances that things are unlikely to get too spicy.
“When we do an improv show, we’re constantly gauging with the audience as to what their level of spiciness might be,” he says. “A 7:30 show, we’re trying to keep it fairly PG. You know, different people have different levels of what they want, but what we’ll often do when we’re doing a show is, we’re clocking what the audience is responding to, and paying attention to what directions they want to go in. It’s not like a late-night dirty show, that’s for sure.”
Arguably the best part of improv, of course, is that you never know precisely what’s going to happen on any given night. Morrison recalls, by way of example, that things didn’t go exactly as planned the first time Kiss and Tell was staged, which he happened to be hosting: “We got catfished!” he exclaims.
The perpetrators were two women, who Morrison says “were doing extremely well at knowing each other. The one lady would come up and I would ask her the questions, and they would win; they got the answers absolutely correct. And then her partner would come up and she got the answers correct.
“We were even asking some pretty risque questions by that point because we realized, ‘Okay, the audience is into this.’ And then at the end of the night, before we were about to honour them and re-create the day when they first fell in love or their first-kiss scene, we were like, ‘Okay, you’ve got to tell us about your first kiss,’ and they said, ‘Well, actually, we’re not a couple. We’re sisters.’”
Bamboozled!
There were no proposals that night, nor can Morrison guarantee that anyone will pop the question on-stage this time around. As nail-bitingly exhilarating as they can be when they happen, he says, they’re not really the point of the whole thing.
“The whole idea of it was to give couples—new couples, old couples, whatever it is—some kind of excitement, like an adrenaline boost to kind of match that feeling of falling in love or those butterflies that you get when you’re first starting dating, or even when you’re in a long-term relationship and you still have those flames burning,” he says.
Listen to the man; he has science on his side.
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