Review: Dropout Improv at Astor Theatre
Dropout Improv at Astor Theatre
Saturday, July 25, 2026
For a company built on elaborate game shows and studio production, Dropout Improv arrived in Perth with remarkably little. Six plush red velvet chairs and Scott Passarella’s keyboard at stage left, and that was about it. For all the streaming polish, the evening ultimately rested on something deceptively simple: people in a room making shit up together.
Judging by the roar that greeted host Kurt Maloney—playfully stepping into Sam Reich’s shoes as “Scam Reich”—the Astor crowd hardly needed convincing. The room buzzed with an alternative thirtysomething demographic who could identify the cast long before they reached centre stage, entering to knowingly bombastic walk-on tunes. Jeremy Culhane’s arrival to You’re The Voice, all shit-eating grin, immediately established him as the evening’s affectionate gremlin, forever leaning into the butt of the joke with glee. The affable Lou Wilson drew one of the night’s biggest ovations, particularly for those unaware he had joined the Australian leg of the tour. His habit of accidentally knocking the mic, each scrape punctuated with a sheepish “sorry”, quietly became one of the night’s own recurring jokes and endearments.
Maloney’s assurance that everything would be improvised because it was “too dumb for pens and paper” became less a disclaimer than a dare.
Opening game, Expert Challenge, established the extraordinary speed at which this ensemble operated. Beginning with Wilson as an authority on ravens, performers constantly interrupted, supplanted and elevated one another’s ideas with dazzling repartee, bouncing between absurd wordplay and Australian riffs. “Cockatoos?” one offered. “What about cockathrees?” Another volleyed before one could escalate to cockatrice. The cast responded with the reflexes of elite athletes, every joke less an individual punchline than another deft “yes, and” handball to collectively keep the scene alive.
Where those opening rounds warmed both cast and audience, Moving Bodies became the first genuine highlight and the clearest demonstration that this wasn’t simply television transplanted onto a stage. An audience volunteer painstakingly manipulated each performer through an increasingly tense rock-climbing expedition, repositioning elbows, knees and shoulders one tap at a time while the ensemble somehow maintained narrative momentum. The absurdity escalated at frightening speed, climaxing in firearms appearing before the immediate correction: “Oh… but this is Australia.” It possessed a live tension television couldn’t replicate. Nobody—not even the performers—knew where it was headed, and judging by the tears streaming down faces, the room surrendered willingly.
The evening’s centrepiece, Mega Replay, revealed the company’s remarkable technical precision without ever sacrificing personality. A sketch involving a chimpanzee, a grandmother’s ashes and Kimia Behpoornia’s backside was replayed through escalating genre prompts, each demanding recall before being joyfully reshaped. A horror-lite trap beat from Passarella launched the rap replay into something approaching the fever dream of Trapped in the Closet. The vaudevillian burlesque version was the standout. Wilson purred through delicious mock coyness before proudly describing the return of Behpoornia’s earlier butt gag as “three-dimensional chess”, only for Oscar Montoya to instantly flatten the moment with a perfect: “That’s just chess.” Jacob Wysocki’s bashful chimp stole the room simply by coyly tugging at the cuff of his trousers and patiently waiting for the audience’s reaction.
By now the performers were visibly pounding water between rounds. On screen, Dropout can look like effortless whimsy. Live, it resembled team sport: split-second decisions, full commitment to the next play—whether delivered as a gift or a glorious stitch-up—and almost no time to recover.
Not every game proved equally fertile. The Aus-exclusive Are You Smarter Than an Australian? briefly exchanged invention for quiz show mechanics, though Passarella’s relentless hot-seat music kept the pressure deliciously high. Wysocki declaring Canberra sounded “like a D&D place somebody made up” and later stumbling into the observation, “Someone invaded you and you call it Invasion Day?” earned cries of both “Prime Minister!” and “Citizenship!” from the audience, perfectly illustrating the show’s willingness to laugh through cultural misunderstanding.
The final musical, inspired by a national-level artistic rollerskater plucked from the audience whose defining admission was, “Oh… I don’t jump,” brought everything together. With Jess McKenna and Passarella conjuring songs from thin air, callbacks accumulated effortlessly. Behpoornia’s chimp returned thanks to a castmate’s setup. Australian touchstones became shared comic language: The cast quickly realised that “a dingo took my baby” wasn’t a guaranteed laugh on home turf, happily folding that discovery into the performance. Sydney became the designated villain after the ensemble sensed the crowd’s appetite for interstate rivalry, while an audience member’s throwaway qualifier—”technically”—was lovingly echoed until it became a tiny study in the peculiar Australian habit of downplaying and softening almost any statement. By the end, Maloney’s accidental Peter Griffin cosplay perhaps explained why Family Guy found its way into one or two more jokes than the evening strictly needed.
It would’ve been easy for Dropout Improv to disappear into internet in-jokes or reward only the already converted. Instead, the opposite happened. You could have walked in knowing nothing about Dropout and still spent two hours crying with laughter. Compared with the intensely parasocial atmosphere surrounding recent internet-native acts like Ninajirachi, this felt less like fandom than community.
Yes, there were probably enough nerds in the room to get a Magic: The Gathering card graded on the spot. That wasn’t really the point. The attraction wasn’t simply recognising the references. It was watching extraordinarily skilled people practise a form of collaboration that feels too rare: smart comedy that refuses to punch down, left-leaning without becoming preachy, anarchic without collapsing into chaos, and built upon the simple pleasure of making somebody else shine.
In an entertainment landscape dominated by personal brands, Dropout Improv offered something far rarer: virtuosity built on generosity.
CAT LANDRO