Comedy was back at The Chrysler Theatre as the touring version of the popular Whose Line Is It Anyway came to Windsor for a night on Friday, May 27. Original series regular Ryan Stiles and regular Greg Proops along with Jeff B. Davis and Joel Murray brought lots of belly laughs with their remarkable improvisation skills.
The evening started with Proops as he introduced their musical director at piano, Bob Derkach, who was also musical director at Toronto’s Second City for 25 years. The rest of the cast was introduced one by one and the process of the evening was explained.
People in the front rows were asked before the show began to write one line sayings or set ups and deposit them in a basket. Throughout the show cast members removed the slips of paper and improvised based on what was written on them. There was also a lot of interaction with the cast asking the audience specific questions such as what is a popular festival, the LaSalle Strawberry Festival, was chosen, or an occupation such as milk man, which resulted in a hilarious singing skit involving milking a bull and making cheesecake.
The funniest thing about improv is you never know what’s going to happen and even when things don’t go as planned, it’s funny. When Ryan and Joel brought up two audience members and asked them to provide sound effects to their sketch, the lack of ability by the audience members to come up with sound effects should have made it difficult, but the comics managed to make that in itself hilarious.
One of the funniest sketches involved Jeff B. Davis bringing a woman with red hair up and serenading her while poking fun at her husband who was a Debbie Gibson fan and sold sports cards which the comedians claimed to have misheard as sports cars.
If you have never seen this show live, I suggest you do next time they come to town. I think we can all agree that we need a little more laughter these days.
Whose Live Anyway
Chrysler Theatre
Windsor, ON
May 28, 2022
All photos by Dan Boshart, 27th Floor Photography