Go with the flow

Anyone who takes up residence in Las Vegas -- even just for the three days universally prescribed to tourists by other tourists -- soon learns an important secret to this city. For all its talk of adult playgrounds and "anything goes," this is a playground with a list of strictly-enforced rules as long as your arm. No horseplay in the casinos. Do not make eye contact with club bouncers. And anything most certainly does not go. Only some things go, really, and they're always the things that safely maximize revenue and minimize civil unrest.

True freedom of movement and expression is as elusive here as it is anywhere, for tourists and hosts alike. Even in the self-professed "Entertainment Capital of the World," expect long odds on finding any song, dance, comedy act, magic show, play or acrobatic feat that, impressive as it may be, doesn't owe its success with audiences to a very prepared, very unspontaneous script.

Donny and Marie's "accidental" collision during the opening number at the Flamingo Showroom? Happens every night, just to establish the endearing oafish brother/cantankerous sister dynamic. Fine. What works, works, but there's still a screaming irony here: When it comes to the real accidents of performance and working without a net, the town that's all about taking a gamble doesn't actually care to do much risk-taking itself.

It does happen here and there, though, and just as regularly as that aging pop duo's crossed-up choreography. Away from the Strip's carefully controlled funhouse, you'll find a Vegas subculture where one really can expect the unexpected. Away from Criss Angel's utterly believable whoa-I-can't-believe-it schtick, you'll find a different stage act altogether, where not even the players can guarantee any particular outcome because no outcome has been decided on, much less rehearsed.

That's improvisation. And whether it takes the form of dramatics or music (twin pillars of mainstream Vegas entertainment) it's an art just as liberating for its practitioners as it is creatively demanding -- the price one pays to get in on a game guided by rules but not garroted by them.

Yes, and ...

The game being played today at Onyx Theatre in Commercial Center is called "Forward Reverse," and it's not easy. This is a comedy improvisation skill-building exercise taught in an intermediate level workshop conducted by Student Experimental Theatre (SET), a group composed of several refugee instructors from the now-defunct Second City Las Vegas troupe, who closed up shop last August after a streak of disappointing ticket sales at its Flamingo theater. Spectacle-loving tourists may have opted for shinier Strip fare, but off The Boulevard, SET is still keeping the discipline rigorous with games like this one.

The rules are simple. Three students act out a fully improvised scene until Instructor Michael Hartnett says, "Reverse." That's when everyone stops and runs the scene backwards from that point, line by line, including the reversal of any physical actions they've performed. It's a memory quiz meant to draw students even more deeply into the moment, and a few steps beyond what's required of intro-level students.

"At first, it's just about getting your bearings," says SET President Amy Pittle backstage. "Understanding the 'group mind' ... in other words, intro students focus on getting better at just listening to a partner, understanding what they're both doing in a scene."

"It's about making the whole ensemble look the best, not just the individual," adds Hartnett after class is dismissed.

If you're unsure about ponying up for one of SET's six-week workshops, a manageable $7 lets you witness the result of all this training at one of its weekly performance nights. Every Monday at 8 p.m., "Improv Vegas" gives trainees a chance to go live with their skills and instructors a chance to practice what they preach. Think Whose Line Is It Anyway, but with a rotating cast of improv aspirants whose starting material is more often than not dictated by quick-poll audience consensus.

Tonight's pre-show moments find several performers milling around the theater space and chatting animatedly with the settling Onyx audience, a mix of new attendees and regulars, some of whom know these actors personally by now. The backstage nerves are right here in full view; most of those scheduled to take the stage tonight are conversing in confident tones, already speaking with just a bit of that over-the-top zeal that's to come. What's more, they're listening (something that can be a challenge for drama types) like overworked police interrogators might listen to small talk at a dinner party, instinctively searching every sentence for new leads.

Once under the lights, they're on the job. "Area 51," shouts an audience member in response to a call for the subject matter that will kick off Round 1 of a two-team improv competition. Within seconds, on a barren stage, Eric Jeffers of the two-man improv team Boating Accident is hoisting an invisible alien onto an invisible autopsy slab while his teammate seamlessly joins in the analysis. The two find instant agreement as improbable, top-secret government lab staffers with jaded, workaday attitudes, poking and prodding at this unseen monstrosity while trading comments about how repugnant the whole situation is. The audience is soon all in, as Jeffers' hands run over the body, giving them a sense of size and shape that's fully corroborated by his partner's own gestures -- even as these two begin to argue over some murky element of the creature's anatomy.

"The characters don't need to be in agreement, but the actors do," says Jeffers during the intermission, going on to describe a simple but cardinal rule of improv known simply as "Yes, and..." It's one thing for an actor to come up with a premise, he explains, but for a scene to really get its legs, the other guy needs to buy into that scenario, no matter what, and move it along.

"It's all about showing 'I know who we are and what we're doing,'" says the Second City-trained intro class instructor. "If you don't do that, you kill the moment. If you do, you can end up going back and forth and it gets addictive. It can be enormously frustrating, too ... in a very good way."

It turns out, that addictive quality is key to the nature of improv and its appeal to moonlighting Strip employees like Jeffers. His performing job with Cirque du Soleil is a fine gig, sure, but a tightly regimented mega-show like Ká can't offer the same dose of "what's next?" that keeps him and others coming back to these shoestring-budget events. With "Improv Vegas," SET is finding a small but devoted crew of converts hooked on all things unscripted, and they're not alone. That same yearning for the high-risk, high-yield blank slate turns up elsewhere in town, attracting the mesmerized attention of other artists in a broad medium having nothing to do with comedy -- at least on the surface.

Totally unheard of

It's Friday around midnight at Pogo's Tavern and the classic jazz is at full tilt. Mustachioed band leader Red Michaels leads off the last set of the night with "Take the A Train," a 1941 Billy Strayhorn composition that, like all of its kind, lends itself to an infinity of interpretations. The regular Friday night combo addresses a few of those now, working in non-verbal concert to flesh out an infectious, rambling melody that somehow complements the bleary-eyed guy in the corner struggling with an ATM keypad.

A seated audience of all ages, from ancient to barely bar-legal, nods, taps feet and hoots to a noise made by drums, upright bass, trumpet, two saxophones and an electric piano. The keys are manned by Joe Kennedy. He might be one of the youngest among these veteran musicians of a 40-years-running Pogo's event that's seen hundreds of players come and go, but he's got to be one of the best this room's ever seen. When it's his turn to solo, he opens it up, playing something forceful, fun and completely fitting -- even if you won't find the notes he's playing or the shape he's giving to this beast outlined on paper anywhere in the world.

The rules he and his bandmates are following aren't quite as simple as the "Yes, and..." of improv comedy, but are the same in essence. In this case, the "yes" amounts to at least playing in the agreed-upon key, while the "and" means doing your part to propel this thing somewhere the thing itself feels like it wants to go, as any jazz player who listens to that ethereal voice can tell you. Kennedy's muse apparently just told him that a circus-y direction is the way to go, so he goes, descending for two bars in a series of notes that pump extra whimsy into the mix -- just before resolving in a stuttering, speech-inflected burst of dotted-eighth-notes. (Think of someone punctuating a spoken tirade with "and that ... is ... the ... truth!") A little later, it's Michaels' bass that gets in its two cents, from a very different but yet compatible perspective, delivered without stepping on Kennedy's or anyone else's toes. How do all these musicians let each other know when they're done "talking"?

In a tight spot? Improvise

Across town, half an hour later on this same Friday night, P.J. McCrae's lounge pianist Don Alexander says his communication with resident singer Joni James can happen a couple different ways.

"Joni might kind of put her hand on the piano when she's ready to stop," he says. "But it's different from person to person. You'll see a lot of people put a hand up in the air, that kind of thing."

If the version they've just done of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" sounds jazzier than you're used to hearing, that's because it is. In terms of the personal stamp he brings to crowd-requested covers, Alexander says much of his stylistic decisions are based on what he already knows best, and the rhythmic emphases found in the stomp progressions from his home state of Louisiana can find their way into most anything. And for all his on-the-fly piano prowess, he insists it's the saxophone -- typically played with one hand, while his other stays on the keys -- on which he improvises most boldly.

Even so, that's only two instruments. How does Alexander begin to fulfill tonight's request for Kid Rock's multi-layered Warren Zevon/Lynyrd Skynrd mash-up "All Summer Long"?

"If you don't have the instrumentation, he says, "you have to take liberties just to keep the sound going ... to give it the tonality and feel it has [in the original]."

So he does, spot-arranging chord progressions to include all the notes originally split among guitar and bass, along with some others that aren't anywhere in Kid Rock's recording but sound like they should be. The table of four that requested the song seems happy in any case.

"I can tell what people want to hear by looking at them when they come in," he says. Strangely, it's a sentiment strikingly similar to that offered by certain club DJs -- possibly the most improvisation-savvy workers to be found on the Strip -- such as Christopher Lawrence, who once told CityLife about his habit of digging into his record bag based on whatever vibe he gets from the crowd when first stepping into the booth.

The real McCoy

When all's said and done, though, it's not as easy as you might think to get much verbal explanation of musical improvisation from those who do it best. One blazing exception is Steve McCoy. He's a local jam band guitarist -- and master orator, it turns out -- currently playing with "a bunch of bands" including High Rollerz and Exper'mental Freakshow. "Magical high-energy funk," he calls a third group, Leo Starwind and the Raft. When asked to say a little about his improv M.O., he's more than happy to oblige, as he did recently at my house, over coffee and two acoustic guitars ... McCoy's glossy black Takamine model played far more competently than the one in my hands.

"With Freakshow, it's about succumbing to the given moment and the trueness of it," he says. "We are controlled by the energy, but improvising within that energy's context."

Whoa. Five minutes into the interview, and the guy already makes it clear he's someone who's given many years of deep thought to the kind of improvisation he loves most. Conversation turns to major sevenths, the circle of fifths, modal compatibilities and a host of other music theory concepts I'm at best dimly aware of, and yet that McCoy is able to go through, rapid-fire -- all at the same time he's playing full-speed, nearly mistake-free (what are mistakes, anyway?) and paraphrasing the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart ("A lot of what people are getting off on [in the Grateful Dead's music] is the friction between our differing viewpoints and the way we just roll with it.")

The technical stuff is interesting, but it's really the more impressionistic comments he offers that ultimately get more to the root of why anyone would want to do what we're doing right now, this first time we've ever met.

"There are so many cerebral approaches you can take toward it," he says, still soloing furiously in B minor over my E. "Or you can just bliss out and not even think about it. Maybe you just hear something off in your mind. You're kind of hearing it right now ... I can hear what you're doing there ... Then we start listening to each other really good, and now I'm trying to harmonize off that riff you're playing, see?"

McCoy mentions how good improvisational playing starts with not being so self-serious about the product you're making, but instead opening yourself up to the inherent lightness of the whole experiment. In other words, having a sense of humor about it -- there's your connection to comedy.

"Eventually, you get to where you're completely succumbing to the moment," he says half an hour of verbal near-silence later. "There's only instinctive reaction."

And it's at that point, in this sudden playground of a living room, with my fingers in serious pain and running dangerously short on ideas, that I feel I've truly understood something about creative freedom in Vegas.