Tara and Rance

Here. The Musical

The Two of Us

More About Tara

More About Rance

Here. The Musical

Two Best Friends Doing Musical Improv

Veteran Chicago improvisers Tara DeFrancisco and Rance Rizzutto have been performing together for well over a thousand shows and well over a decade.

HERE is one of Chicago’s most lauded shows presenting the original two-person improvised musical. Chicago Tribune Critic-Recommended and called “Nothing Short of Genius” by NPR, this show has been brought to 14 countries and 40 cities worldwide.

In HERE, Tara and Rance get one suggestion to create theme through an opening number, design characters and storylines inspired by that theme, and effortlessly weave the strings together to discover one piece.

Funny, beautiful, and charming, HERE “has shown something new and amazing is possible in improvisation” and has been called groundbreaking by audiences around the globe.

Bring Here to your city!

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Testimonials

The Two of Us

Tara and Rance

Tara and Rance have been performing and teaching together for years!

Now they bring to you their two person improvised musical, Here. You can catch Here at the iO Theater in Chicago, or better yet, you can bring it to YOUR city!

Since you’re bringing us to your city, you may as well have us take our combined 25+ years of improv experience and share our specialties with your community…we can teach workshops while we’re there!

Bring Here to your city!

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More About Tara

Tara DeFrancisco

TARA DEFRANCISCO is a headlining performer at iO Chicago (on the Deltones, Chaos Theory, Armando, defrancisCo), ComedySportz (Mainstage), and a three year vet of the Second City Touring Company. She’s taught for those theatres and independently, both at home and internationally. Media-wise, you might see her in a Las Vegas commercial campaign, on Delusions of Grandeur (ABC Family/Blip TV), soon in the new feature film The Life & Death of an Unhappily Married Man (2015), or in several projects filmed for the satirical newspaper, The Onion.

She is also the founder and president of The Improv Retreat (http://theimprovretreat.com), the acclaimed and beloved summer camp for adult improvisers in the midwest. In March of 2015, weekly residency of Here (a two person longform improvised musical, performed with Rance Rizzutto) is scheduled for Thursdays at iO around their worldwide tour dates. Tara has won numerous awards, including Top Performer in Chicago from New City, Funniest Person in Chicago by the Free Press, Top 25 Of Comedy in the US by Curve Magazine, as well as Chicago Tribune Show of the Season for the long running renegade feat, defrancisCo.

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More About Rance

Rance Rizzutto

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Hi, I’m Rance Rizzutto. I started doing improv with ComedySportz in Portland as well as joining Portland’s longest running sketch comedy troupe, The Third Floor. I performed with both until making the decision to head to Chicago!

Since moving to Chicago in 2003 I have performed with ComedySportz, Chicago, DSI (The Beatbox), Silent Treatment (award winning two-person silent improv), seven8nine, and various other improv teams and venues.

Second City also hired me to perform improv and sketch with their theatrical division aboard Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL). I’ve performed sketch and improv all over the seas. Caribbean, Mediterranean, Atlantic Ocean, and in late 2009, the Pacific Ocean…Hawaii. All in all, I’ve spent 17 months traveling and performing aboard cruise ships. That’s a LOT of buffet food.

Traveling with Second City also made possible one of my favorite improv opportunities: sitting in with the Istanbul, Turkey improv group Istanbulimpro and singing about swearing with cultural awareness (SFW).

After years of performing, I started teaching as well. I currently teach for iO, and have taught for ComedySportz and Second City in the past. People come from all over the world to study improvisation in Chicago, and I’ve been thrilled to help people grow.

Best yet, in 2014 iO sent Tara and I to Europe to teach their 3-day intensives. In that time we also got to perform Here in Estonia, Germany, Copenhagen, and Latvia.

After years at iO Chicago performing with The Deltones and Chaos Theory on Saturday nights, (and of course Here with Tara DeFrancisco), Tara and I moved to Columbus, OH to start The Nest Theatre!

SHARP IMPROV FROM A SEASONED COUPLE IN ‘HERE’

-Nina Metz August 5, 2015

Click to read the review!

There is a looseness and also a precision that seasoned improv performers bring to the stage, and it is this combination — disciplined but unpredictable — that can elevate a scene into something exceptional. The real-life couple Tara DeFrancisco and Rance Rizzutto are crack purveyors of this kind of thing.

Their two-person musical improv show at iO Theater has an easygoing confidence but also a satisfying weirdness. Consider this exchange, which begins with an absurdist insult:

Rizzutto: “Where I grew up, you know what we’d call you? A broken refrigerator.”

DeFrancisco, after a pause: “That seems very … local.”

It’s such a specific skill, what they’re doing, and the songs that grow out of their scenes don’t halt the plot but actually advance it.

Their show last week may have gone on two scenes too long — maybe they didn’t sense that they had reached the show’s natural conclusion, or maybe they kept going due to the stage manager and/or their (extremely talented) music accompanist Dave Asher, both of whom help set the pace — but this was the show’s only weak point.

In improv, that kind of consistency is a rarity.
Playing a young couple testing the romantic waters, DeFrancisco admitted, “I’m really bad at social cues.” Without missing a beat came Rizzutto’s reply: “Awesome.”

“Just don’t run away,” he told her. “It’s my apartment,” she pointed out, nodding to their surroundings and launching an entire song inspired by the idea that they’re destined to be together because … well, she’s not exactly going to bolt from her own apartment.

That’s the kind of ridiculous but plaintive key they’re working in. DeFrancisco is such a major presence as a performer — she can play it tough or clueless, and your eye is drawn to her every time — and Rizzutto is smart about dialing his energy down just enough to provide some balance.

He’s exceptionally good at playing good-natured if somewhat dimwitted guys, and it works in terrific contrast to DeFrancisco’s sweet-sour sensibility, which has all sorts of wonderfully detailed conversational tics and pauses. But more than that, together they create genuine emotional moments.

Strange little scenario or not, I was rooting for those two crazy kids in that apartment.

Bring HERE to YOU!

Want to know some random facts?

2000++

Shows performed together

20+

Years performed together

24

Countries performed in (so far)

35%

Actual combined amount Italian

What OTHER people are saying

HERE, the two person improvisational musical by Tara & Rance was nothing short of genius.

Michael Stock NPR (Miami, FL)

Tara and Rance were outstanding! Their show had everything – depth, fun, emotion and mind-blowing connections. Their ability to collaboratively make up great songs on the spot is extraordinary.

Tobias Sailer owner AMS Impro Theater (Bremen, Germany)

These two veterans have showed our community something new and amazing is possible in improvisation.

TIDES Festival Columbus, OH

The 12-year stage relationship is evident in the undeniable magic and chemistry between Tara and Rance. They move fluidly through the characters they invent before your eyes. Improvisation is difficult enough, but these two brilliantly create an engaging, touching, funny story, often spontaneously choreographed in a seemingly rehearsed musical format. Bravo!

Lisa Legend Miami, FL

The best show there is! Truly amazing and breathtaking. They create songs like geniuses, and perform them like superstars.

Kaspars Breidaks Radio SWH (Riga, Latvia)

We WILL bring them back!

Mia Roberts ComedySportz manager (Indianapolis, IN)

HERE is a tour-de-force of musical improv that lights up the stage. Choc-filled with laughs, characters you really care about and songs that you would swear were written, DeFrancisco and Rizzutto will tantalize and leave you begging for more. HERE is a show that will leave you moved and filled with the consistent hilarity that most improv shows aim to produce, but seldom deliver. See this, or you’ll be kicking yourself!

David Christopher Just The Funny Theater owner (Miami, FL)

HERE with Tara and Rance is the kind of a show you want everyone to see — new improvisers, old improvisers, family, friends, a random person off the street, just for real – anyone you can. They clearly have loads of fun together by taking their time, developing rich characters, and pulling it all together in a magical hour-long show. When they came to St. Louis, the packed house immediately rose to their feet at the conclusion. Not used as a gimmick, their incredible ability to jump into song at any given moment shows just how locked in they are to each other. Laughing non-stop with goosebumps along the way, HERE whisks you away and doesn’t drop you until the last moment. HERE merited only the second standing ovation recorded in our theater in over five years.

Kevin McKernan The Improv Shop owner (St. Louis, MO)