Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood have made a career of never reading from the script.
Sherwood, a California native, and Mochrie, a Canadian, are masters of improvisation. They spent a decade together on television's "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" -- first with the original British series and then on ABC when it was introduced to American audiences in 1998.
The show's format featured a number of thespian games, in which the participants were given a situation or characters and created a scene on the spot. The U.S. version ended in 2006, but it has remained on television in syndication.
Sherwood, who spoke by phone in advance of tonight's show at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City, thinks "Whose Line" works well in syndication.
"Part of that is, it's kind of like a human cartoon," he said. "It's goofy-like in a way the old Warner Bros. cartoons were. That part of it doesn't seem dated. Maybe our hairdos do. It holds up that way because it's sort of a universal situation."
Mochrie, Ryan Stiles and Wayne Brady were the full-time cast members in the American version of "Whose Line." A fourth comedian was used in rotation; Sherwood was one of those rotating comedians. He appeared in about a third of the shows during the program's eight-year run on ABC, which also saw the likes of Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Stephen Colbert sitting in.
Finding funny
When Sherwood appeared on the show, there always seemed to be more innuendo -- and a few more censored bleeps.
"I think it's just that I always liked pushing the envelope," Sherwood said. "We had censors there, so I would try and walk that line just as close as I could to it. Because I have a mischievous nature, I think."
Sherwood's career has always been focused on acting. But he also understood that he had the uncanny ability to make people chuckle.
"I have always liked making people laugh, and I was always making people laugh kind of off-the-cuff through grade school, high school and college. So it was just more of a structured form of what I had always been doing with just being a funny person," he said. "I tried stand-up and it just wasn't for me."
But improv has stuck with Sherwood for 20-plus years.
Sherwood joined the Second City improv group in Los Angeles to develop his improv chops when a fellow member, Ryan Stiles, told him that the "Whose Line" producers were coming through town looking for new members. He subsequently joined Stiles and the cast in Britain in 1989.
Game on
For more than two hours onstage, Mochrie and Sherwood create a show that has no rehearsal and zero script. They don't even know what games they'll play two hours before the show begins.
"We sort of leave it up in the air," Sherwood said. "We write out our set list for what we are going to play that night maybe an hour before the show. If we are playing cards, then maybe 10 minutes before the show."
Fans of the TV show will be glad to know the two still carry over several games to their live act.
And then there is what Sherwood describes as the "most dangerous improv game ever." The two hosts don blindfolds and the stage is covered with hundreds of live mousetraps. Mochrie and Sherwood then construct a scene while walking aimlessly among the traps.
"We have a new wrinkle to that, that hopefully based on the way the stage works, we can do. We have added a new element of danger to it," Sherwood said.
The mousetraps are real, and the excruciating looks on their faces are genuine.
"If you kind of step flat on them and it sort of goes off right under your whole foot, then it doesn't hurt so bad," Sherwood said. "But if you sort of catch it with just one toe and the whole thing comes right down on your toe knuckle -- it really hurts."
To increase the suspense, they typically place several large rat traps in the midst of the smaller rodent-killing machines.
Says Sherwood: "We try to make sure we never set one of those off."
PREVIEW
* WHO: Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood
* WHEN: 8 p.m. today
* WHERE: Abravanel Hall, 123 W. South Temple, Salt Lake City
* TICKETS: $27.50-$47.50. ArtTix, (888) 451-ARTS.
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