Peter Gwinn 11/15/06 Part 2

JF: So how did Baby Wants Candy start to morph into what it is today?


PG: We had a little bit of trouble with our personel at the beginning. Kara McNamara from Faulty Wiring was one of the people I asked to be on it and she made like one rehearsal and never showed up again. She just wasn't interested. We had a lot of shifting in people for a while until it stablized. We didn't have stability with coaches. Besser was coaching us at first, then I don't know if that's when he moved to New York or what. Finally, we had this guy named Rob Mello coach us. Rob was working on trying to incorporate Meisner theory into improv. I don't know if you've ever taken a Meisner class.



JF: I've done a couple Meisner excersizes and stuff like that.


PG: Yeah, [laughs] it's pretty horrible. It's just exhausting and icky, and you wind up either hating somebody or kissing somebody every time you do it. We were doing that. Rob was also working with another team called Inside Vladimir, which I was performing on. So was somebody else on Baby I think. Because Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had just left to go do Second City, so they asked me fill-in. So I had two nights of Meisner improv a week. It was basically suicidal.



JF: That must have been frustrating for you not only having to do it, but also because you had intended Baby Wants Candy to be a kind of by the book Harold team, and this other idea was coming in and influencing it.


PG: Yeah, we were going for it or whatever. We were started as an experimental team, so we were like 'well, we're experimenting.'



JF: [laughs] Right. I've heard some people mention the Drum Show or something that Baby Wants Candy did.


PG: [laughs] It was the Pot Show. That was in that phase. We did that in rehearsal a couple times, then Mello was like 'I want to do this in a show.' He had a giant soup pot. We rehearsed in the back room of the bar/restaraunt where worked. He took this giant soup pot and played it like a drum at the side of the stage. And we improvised. To a drum. And it was ...Yeah. I'm sure it had great artistic merit, but we confused and alienated many of the people in our audience, except the people who were just making fun of us. After that we were like 'yeah, we need to switch coaches.'



JF: That kind of brings up the idea of how important do you think it is for a group to have some self-direction, and what's the relationship of a coach to their team?


PG: When it works best, it's really symbiotic. When I've coached groups, that's the first thing I try to figure out: what are the team goals and how do they want to approach them? I coached a team in Chicago called People of Earth, and we just clicked immediately. The stuff I wanted to do really meshed with the stuff they wanted to do. I was able to find a way to give them direction and inspiration that they responded to very well. And that team was fantastic. They did just terrific work, to the point that the next team I coached after them it took me two months that they weren't People of Earth and I need to do stuff differently.

Actually, that's what Baby Wants Candy did next. We were like 'this was so horrible. I want to do something fun.' We picked a coach named Scot Robinson who was like the most fun, upbeat improviser in town. We totally clicked with him immediately. He had us doing really fun forms. We started doing Documentaries that were so fun.



JF: How did you guys start doing the Musical?


PG: There was a piano player at IO back then named David Adler, and he was fantastic. It was so fun when a song came up. If it was a new team and they were having a sucky show, and they pulled out some terrible roommate scene or something. It'd be like 'why don't you wash the dishes.' He'd stand up on the piano and play the theme to the sitcom that the scene was a part was. He'd be like 'one of them's dirty. One of them clean. It's two crazy roommates! What will happen next!?' And it was hilarious. To just about everybody except for the people in the scene. But it saved the show, because maybe they felt called out in the scene, but the audience would laugh at their scene after that. Because he basically named the game of the scene, which maybe they didn't know what it was.

Anyway, he was fantastic and was leaving to go to USC film scoring school. We had so much fun when songs came up. We were like 'let's do a Musical so we can sing with Dave as much as possible before he leaves.' So we were going to do Musicals for the next two weeks until he was gone, but the got such a great response and they were so much fun to do that we just kept doing them.



JF: I've never really thought about that before. So at IO that had a piano player who would just interject during a normal Harold if he felt it was appropriate?


PG: Yeah, they don't do that anymore. There's still a piano player there, and maybe they'll pimp a song or something. Dave was one of those guys who was so good that he good get away with that. It's too bad that New York doesn't have that, because I think it can add a nice dimension.



JF: Did you have any experience doing musical comedy or was it new to you?


PG: It was pretty new to me. I had seen shows. I had been in a musical somewhere. I had been in a couple at school, and had done musical improv games, and that was about that.



JF: How did you adapt to doing a full-blown musical? Did you have to change your style?


PG: Yeah, it's a different style. When we started out doing it, our suggestion was a town secret. Every show was set in 1950's America with the picket fences. The perfect town with a terrible secret was kind of the set-up for every show, which led us to play in an overly chipper Donna Reed show sort of way. You kind of need to come out a little aggressive to establish all those relationships and everything. That's more of a musical theater convention than improv.



JF: Are there any tips or guidelines that people use to get songs to rhyme?


PG: My tip has always been: think in couplets and work backwards. So, we're singing a song about coffee or whatever, and I decide 'ok, I'm going to say a line about drinking a latte.' So, I know that my rhyme word is latte. If that's the funny word, I'm going to end the couplet on it. So, now I have the remaining amount of time existing in this moment to think of any line for latte and end the first line with it. Usually, if you're ending on the funny word, it doesn't really matter what the set-up word is. 'There's a cup of coffee that I got-te' is still going to work.



JF: Do you find you get anything out of musical improv that you don't get out of straight improv? What brings you back to it?


PG: The thing that I really love about musical improv even more so than straight improv is that sense of group mind. My favorite thing in the world in musical improv is when you're playing along with the song and you just sort of guess where the piano player is going to go with the next chord change and you're right. It's that other layer of shared language. You have that even again when you add a player and you're harmonizing. Two people harmonizing and picking the same chord progression as the piano player is a pretty phenominal thing to do, as well as to watch.



JF: What brought you to New York?


PG: I was sort of done with Chicago career-wise. I had been through Second City. I was just doing corporate work. I wanted to do a tv job. In Chicago, people barely ever come to town looking for people, so I decided I needed to go to somewhere where the jobs were. At the same time, my wife was applying to Medical school. We were looking at moving to L.A. or New York. She got into Columbia and USC, but Columbia is a way better Medical school. So, we were like 'perfect. You go to Columbia. I'll move to New York.'



JF: So what was your experience like in New York, especially at the UCB, after you moved here?


PG: It was totally positive. Everybody out here was very welcoming. I had a blast playing on Arsenal on Harold Night. I like the New York scene. The people I knew in Chicago, especially when I left, were frequently kind of getting frustrated, because they had been at Improv Olympic for eight years and hadn't really done anything else. They were at a point where you need to decide you're going to move to New York or L.A. and pursue a comedy career, or you need to sort of resign yourself that this is what we've got going on, make the best of it. But there is always a tension between those two things, I think.

What results is that you get people kind of scrambling to be the top of the heap at Improv Olympic or the Playground, and there's too much politics. I kind of feel that in New York, because you have the backdrop of all the industry, that it's in better prespective. It sort of seeps into the mindset in New York that you're here to showcase yourself, so that you can move onto bigger and better things, as opposed to this is the highest you'll ever get, which creates some desperation in some people.



JF: So did you notice any differences artistically?


PG: Yeah, UCB is super-fast, super-premise heavy. Out here the premise is what they teach. It's all about the game, and in Chicago it's all about the character. I think it's not out of line to say that the game generates the characters, and in Chicago the character generate the game.



JF: Do you have a preference between those two?


PG: My preference is a poised tight rope right in between the two. I think you should not enter a scene thinking either one of those is going to happen. I think you should enter a scene aware of which one of those is happening and adjust accordingly.



JF: So, how do you initiate personally? Do you walk that tight rope when you're initiating? Sometimes you have a game and sometimes you have a character?


PG: It depends what I'm pulling out of the source. If it's an ASSSSCAT monologue, sometime I'll have a whole concept. Last week, a monologue had to do with wishing life was like cartoons, where you could run off a cliff and have time to realize you've run off a cliff but you have time to realize you've run off a cliff before you fall. So, from that I initiated a scene where I was a doctor treating patients with cartoon injuries. My initiation was 'the problem is your head is shaped like a mailbox. Have you run at high speeds into a mailbox recently?' That started a tag-out run where everybody had an injury from a cartoon. So, that was really premise-y.

I've also had scenes where it's like if the monologue complains that they're entitled to something and I kind of thought it was a weird statement, I would go in as a character feeling very entitled, and adapt that to whatever the other person chose.



JF: Do you find you get different types of initiations from different openings? Like a monologue you may be able to draw a game out of more often, as opposed to an organic opening where maybe it's harder to get a game?


PG: I really don't think so actually. You can get anything out of any type of opening. For a minute, I was going to say it's easier to comment on monologues, because it's just one person standing there, but I've been in organic openings where someone says something and I'm sort of commenting on it in the initiation.