If, like me, you’ve been to all previous 10 years of the Chicago Improv Festival, you might have been wondering what happened to the annual April confab of spontaneously funny people. Isn’t it now almost June?

Well, this year the writers' strike got in the way.

“We knew many of the people we wanted were on strike,” says Jonathan Pitts, the disarmingly frank executive director of the festival. “And we knew that if the strike got settled, they’d all be rushing back to work. So we put the festival back a few weeks.”

So that’s why the Chicago Improv Festival kicks off its week of shows on Monday night.

That has caused some logistical issues. As Pitts freely admits, this is a more challenging and competitive time of year to make some noise.

The official hotel has bowed out, since rooms are easy to fill in Chicago after Memorial Day. The Park West nightclub, a popular Improv Festival venue, wasn’t available this time. And after a variety of disputes with the Athenaeum Theatre, the long-time venue for the festival mainstage, this year the Improv Festival has pulled out of that location altogether. The headlining events are all taking place at the Lakeshore Theater, a joint with about one-third the audience capacity of the Athenaeum, but a much more hospitable atmosphere for a party-loving comedy crowd.

So there has been some retrenchment. Two weeks of shows have become one. The festival has attracted some major headliners over the years and it’s probably fair to say that this year’s slate of visiting artists is considerably more subdued. Sure, Jack McBrayer and Scott Adsit will be on hand, but there are fewer big TV names—such as past attendees Tina Fey, Jeff Garland, Adam McKay, Amy Poehler, Dan Castellaneta, George Wendt and so on—to draw a massive crowd of people unfamiliar with the local improv scene.

But I’ve always felt that headliners at the Improv Festival were a mixed bag.

For lots of former denizens of the city, this was a chance to come home during Cubs season, drink some Old Style and hang with the old buds. That’s great—and it’s useful for the city in so many ways to keep attached to the stars it makes. But it didn’t exactly create a climate where the performance topped everyone’s list of priorities—I sat through a lot of shows where the performers were having more fun than the audience. The best work at the festival has always taken place in the smaller venues.

So I think the change—holding the festival in a more intimate theater with a main focus given to the up-and-comers of the profession—is probably a change for the better, even if total attendance is unlikely to rival the numbers in 2005 or 2006.

Pitts and artistic director Mark Sutton are very good at sticking acts that deserve attention underneath headline artists, thus giving them an audience and additional exposure. That’s the plan again this year.
I just hope that the Improv Festival doesn’t lose its function as guardians of the form—honoring the pioneers and, in essence, building an improv hall of fame and inviting international artists to perform where it all began.

Pitts has built a very impressive case over the years that improv was a Chicago invention. Now the festival has to maintain its role as curator in chief, even as it throws open the doors to the young, fresh and the thirsty.