In the afternoon, I recorded a couple of hours with a teacher from the UCB whom I’ve wanted to interview for some time. I’ll be whittling that down to a podcast soon. And in the evening I did my first podcast recorded live in front of an audience. The show was at the People’s Improv Theater and featured three teachers, Ed Herbstman of the Magnet, Nate Starkey of the PIT and Porter Mason of the UCB. For both of these, I was using my new digital recorder and I think it came out great. I posted the podcast up today. I hope you enjoy it.

One thing that I especially liked about the panel interview approach, is that the conversation flowed quite naturally and I think we each gave each other ideas. The end result is probably better than if I tried to interview them separately. One topic flowed to the next and when we finished–about 20 minutes over–we still had plenty to talk about. I hope I’ll be able to do these live panels again.

If you are an organizer for an improv festival or schedule shows for a theater and would like me to do one of these live at your venue, please let me know.

And finally, if you are in New York, and enjoyed this live podcast, do me a favor and pick out another show to see at the PIT, go to see it and be sure to tell the manager that Kevin Mullaney from the IRC Podcast told you to go. Thanks!

It’s been almost five months since I put up a podcast. I recorded this one in June. I have another one from June that I hope to get up next week. These would have been up much sooner, but my mother passed away in July and my father had a stroke in August. As you can imagine, updating the podcast hasn’t been a priority and once I had taken a couple of months to take care of family matters, it proved difficult for me to jump back in and get these uploaded.

However, I’m back and should have enough time to get this going again. I’d love for this to be weekly, but I know myself better than to promise that right now. I’m going to be acquiring some new recording equipment that should allow me to finally do in-person interviews. So you should look forward to a whole bunch of new interviews going up in the coming months.

This week I started pages for the New York groups Centralia and Burn Manhattan. I also started a page for Inside Vladimir, a long running Chicago team that featured Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (I added some info to both of their pages also, but they are still a bit sparse). I also added a little information on a team I was on and coached in NYC called Ice-Nine. There is also a fairly new page for the team Leo Callahan and updates on the pages for the Magnet Theater and New York performer Micheal Short.

There are lots of pages that could use some love. I’m trying to get the guys from Vladimir to add more information about the group to their page. I was a bit surprised that there was not a page for The Real Real World, given it’s long run in New York and the many early UCBT improvisors who were a part of that show. There was also a Chicago version that included many performers from Vladimir. I’d also like to get something up for the Living Room. This was a show created by The Family in the 90s at ImprovOlympic (now iO) and also featured Fey and Poehler. It had a very simple format of creating a fake living room on stage where the performers could discuss issues and tell stories and then jump up and do scenework whenever an idea came to mind. The goal of the original run was to make a TV pilot, which did get shot, but wasn’t sold to my knowledge.

If you have information about any of these items that you would like to add, please start an account there and add it.