The Grizzly is currently running at the Hideout Theatre; it’s an improvised show inspired by the hit TV show The Bear, about life in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant in Chicago. Like a lot of inspired-by-a-piece-of-pop-culture improv shows, The Grizzly is a little bit of a sendup and a little bit of a love letter.
“So I have a lot of love for The Bear,” says The Grizzly creator and director Lex Okeke. “I love the cast. I love the actors, the concept of the show, the fact that it's a 30-minute show and also that it's a drama but also a comedy. And then generally, I also just love cooking television shows, whether that's been reality shows, competition [shows] or movies like The Menu, TV shows like Kitchen Confidential, which is I think based off of the Kitchen Confidential book by Anthony Bourdain. I really just enjoy all of it, primarily because I myself love to cook and I grew up around cooking. I grew up cooking with my mom, and learning how to do that for myself as I became an adult.”
Okeke paired her love of cooking with her love of doing funny things onstage and came up with The Grizzly. In doing so, she’s created an improv show that’s attempting to mirror the format of The Bear and the layout of a fine meal.
“The general format that we're using is called the ‘Harold,’ which is something out of Chicago Improv,” Okeke explains. The Harold is a format developed by improv legend Del Close starting in the 1960s; in a nutshell it’s a type of longform improvisation in which scenes that originally appear to be very different all come together by the end of the show.
“But… I've kind of taken that concept of the Harold and translated it into a five-course meal, right? So we have our aperitif, which is the drink that you have at the beginning of the meal, we've got appetizers, we have an entree, we have a dessert,” Okeke says, “and all of that kind of captures the fast paced [nature] of the show, the groundedness of the characters, the increasingly wacky and chaotic nature of the different situations that take place on the show. I also in particular wanted it to be a Harold format because it allows for multiple storylines, like an A storyline, a B storyline, and a C storyline to take place within one show and to show up repeatedly throughout the show.”
It's an ambitious and complicated format, so Okeke devised a way to help keep things on track during each show. “I have some some stylistic pieces that I've added where I'm off to the side and I shout ‘order up!’ and I give each order, which would be the name of each scene,” she says, “like a funky kind of name that signals to my cast, okay, this is this particular scene. We're gonna return back to that in the entree course and we're gonna return back to that in the dessert course.”
Okeke says that in addition to being a tribute to The Bear, The Grizzly is also a tribute to the real people who work in real restaurants. “There's so many ways that we wanna pay homage to this industry that keeps all of us fed, keeps all of us, you know, keeps everyone going,” she says. “I'm hoping that our audience takes away that food is something that is a really great way to kind of bring people together. And that food can also just really be a metaphor for so many different things in life. Food can be a metaphor for conflict. It can be a metaphor for comedy. And also it can just be food and it can be nice and tasty and you can eat it and that can also be the only thing you do with it.”
'The Grizzly' has its final show September 14 at the Hideout Theatre.
