Zach Reino & Jess McKenna on Taking Their Musical Comedy Improv Show ‘Up and Autumn’ on the Road

“We do stupid very well,” says Zach Reino, one-half of the comedy improv duo, Off Book. “But hopefully it can be stupid and impressive at the same time.”

As an elfen green Star Wars character once said. “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” And Reino and his partner in comedy, Jessica McKenna do stupid and impressive extremely well — a combination that has their fans convulsing with laughter.

After years doing a podcast of the same name, Reno and McKenna, who met and began collaborating at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles, have taken Off Book — roughly 50 minutes of musical comedy improvised entirely from a single word suggested by their audience — on the road. And they are attracting sold-out crowds. On Nov. 19 and 20, they will perform two such shows in New York, one in Brooklyn, the other in Manhattan on their 13-date Up and Autumn tour, which finishes Dec. 7 in Charlotte, NC.

Their contributions to comedy extend beyond improv, and they spoke to Billboard via Zoom about their TV work and Mock Trial, the non-musical movie they financed and shot on their own and plan to premiere next year.

Just so it’s clear, you are entirely improvising onstage. There are no set songs.

Zach Reino: Yeah. We show up to a theater with usually just a pianist and a drummer. We get a word from the audience. Jess and I then talk about that word onstage. You know, what does this word make us think of. Then the pianist starts playing, and we improvise a full musical from there. There is no more preparation than that. People come up to us after and say, “You planned some of that, right?” It’s a huge compliment, and thank you, but we are not lying to you.

In the videos I’ve watched of your improv, the songs are so fluid. They sound like you wrote them in advance and practiced them.

Jess McKenna: Part of it is there’s two of us, and we have worked very closely together as each other’s No. 1 creative collaborator for a decade. Unless there’s a comedic reason, or we unlock something, we’re usually following a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out, song structure. And if I see Zach take a lead on a verse I’m probably trying to think of the chorus. He knows that he can stop and take a breath. Also, at the chorus, I’m trying to make it simple, and on the comedic side, state the comedic idea in the chorus. The it doesn’t feel halting is there are handoffs happening, and we are giving each other five seconds to breathe. It’s truly just a muscle. There was a period before the pandemic where between our podcast and live shows at UCB we were doing three a week.

Reino: For years.

McKenna: So, you get used to hey, if I end on an open vowel sound, I’ll probably find a rhyme. It’s the little stuff that your ear gets used to doing.

Reino: Which isn’t to say that if you watch a whole show, there won’t be times when the wheels fall off because we’re both laughing too hard at something that we didn’t expect to happen. If you are Googling us and looking at music videos, some of that stuff is prewritten. But if you were looking at a clip from Off Book, that’s all improvised.

So, from city to city, your shows are completely different?

McKenna: Oh yeah, they have to be.

Reino: It makes touring hard because when you do 10 in a row —

McKenna: Our brains are melted. That has been a dial we’ve had to find as we’ve been touring more over the last two years. We’ve been trying to fine-tune what is exactly the right amount of shows to be financially reasonable while hitting as many cities in a region that are reasonable for us as performers.

But the armor we’ve developed is that improv is really ephemeral for the audience — and for us. When you’re a beginner, you have shows where you think, “Oh God, why didn’t I think of something better there?” But for Zach and me, the great gift is that they live, they die, they’re gone.

Reino: There was a time, especially at the beginning, when they were all pretty much narrative structure: hero’s journey, heroes, villains and all that. We still do them occasionally, but we will also do shows where, for instance, Spider-Man goes to therapy, and the whole episode is just Spider-Man in a therapist’s office. We have an episode that’s grad night at Disneyland. We get to explore storytelling from a lot of different angles.

What kind of music inspires you?

Reino: It’s a blend. In our show, you can tell that we are both lovers of — capital M — musical theater, but musical theater tends to be a snake that eats its own tail in terms of the vibe that’s put forward. And it turns a lot of people off. We are both huge pop music fans. We’re both huge emo fans. We are both Irish and Scottish folk music fans. I won’t speak for Jess, but what we try to bring to the show is, what if also rock and roll?  What if also rap?

McKenna: There used to be a lot of rap.

Reino: But that was another time.

McKenna: As working partners, Zach and I are like, “Work smarter, not harder.” So, the music needs to be knowable, hookable and [uncomplicated enough] for us to think of lyrics as we come up with them. We did 300 episodes in the studio, and we’ve continued to tour. We would get bored if we were only doing musical theater pastiche.

We’ll be like, is there a genre choice here that will hang a lantern on the joke? Is there a choice that will fly in contrast to the joke, which will then make the joke funnier? For instance, we did a show in San Francisco earlier this year where we had a whole song with a very “Cat’s in the Cradle” vibe about a father and son. It’s really exciting to be able to pull as many different musical references as possible.

Reino: Our third collaborator in improvisation is the band. So, if the band is like, this one’s a ska song, then, it’s, “Well, I guess this is a ska song.”

McKenna: We just have to say “yes.”

Do you have muscle memory for structure and time?

McKenna: Yeah. There’s that internal metronome of set up the story, meet our characters, maybe introduce what might be a conflict or an area for discovery or growth or what have you. Then let’s make sure we have some fun and games in the middle where we introduce characters that may or may not be involved in the climax — where, say, a random butler character walks on and says one ridiculous thing about needing to polish the shower. And the piano player starts playing.

Like Zach said, our band is our third collaborator. If they think there should be a song, well then, the character who was going to say just two lines, is singing a whole song about why they love a gleaming shower.

We like when our stories have a satisfying narrative and when the music is great, but we’re comedy-first. So, we have to make sure that we are leaving space to pursue a purely comedic idea even if it stalls our momentum. So, if we’ve given ourselves the impossible task of doing a murder mystery while playing with time travel in a wormhole, we can yada-yada in a way that, our audience is, “Yeah, we get it.”

Additionally, we do a talk back with the audience where they can ask us questions, like, “Why did the time portal turn into friendship?”

Reino: They use that opportunity to lightly roast us for things that they noticed that we have done wrong.

McKenna: Then we always end with a song. Often, it’ll be super tangential. Remember the butler who polishes the shower? He also polishes the refrigerator. Here’s that version. It’s pretty silly. We take it seriously in that we try to be our best at it, but there’s nothing dorkier in the world than musical improv.

How long is the show usually?

McKenna: From suggestion through the talk-back and final song, it’s typically 75 minutes, with the main meat of the musical being around 50 minutes.

Given that your shows are entirely improvised, does that mean you don’t have to get together to practice?

We don’t practice. We travel with a pianist, but we hire local drummers. When I email them, it’s, “The practice will be the soundcheck and it will be mostly getting levels. That’s pretty much it.” One of the reasons we stopped doing the show weekly in studio was that when you are doing too much improv, you get worse at it. You need to go out and live your life, so that you have things to bring back to the show. Otherwise, you’re just doing improv about the last improv scene you did, and no one wants that.

You also write music and comedy for TV shows, and I understand you are working on movies. Can you talk about those projects?

McKenna: That’s the first thing we did at the beginning of our careers. We would write one-off comedy songs and shoot them as music videos — definitely inspired by The Lonely Island. From there, one of our first writing gigs was writing music for a Nickelodeon digital initiative which led to writing for musical TV shows and movies for Nickelodeon and DreamWorks.

We’d love to make a musical feature. We understand that the modern audience has [difficulty with] suspension of disbelief when it comes to musicals. We’ve had some success in developing animated projects. Another is the kid space. But that’s not exactly where we want to live. So, we’ve spent the last five years writing, in an ensemble, a live-action, true comedy musical with David Wang that he would direct.

We developed it with Elizabeth Banks‘ company, Brownstone. We sold it to Amazon, Amazon eventually passed and it came back to us. Now we’re looking at pivoting to the stage because we love it. It’s very funny. So, if you have a hard time watching a real human break into song, maybe you won’t feel that way if you’ve been laughing. We adore this project, and it will get its way into the world one way or another.

Reino: We are doing a live presentation of it early next year in Los Angeles.

Do you have a title?

McKenna: It’s called Three Months Later, and it’s about a plane that goes down safely in the Alaskan/Canadian wilderness. It’s a mother-daughter at its heart but also a broad ensemble comedy about what happens three months later when they’re still stuck.

It sounds like you’d be great to do an off Broadway or Broadway play. I’m thinking of Book of Mormon.

Zach Reino: Yeah, what was our movie, Three Months Later — which is now our live musical Three Months Later — that is the plan for that.

It sounds like you could follow in the footsteps of The Book of Mormon.

McKenna: That’s a huge yes. That musical is a North star for sure. And the South Park musical [South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut] is huge for Zach. It’s clear that Trey Parker and Matt Stone love musicals.

Reino: The South Park guys have been doing this forever and tricking people that don’t like musicals. Obviously, there’s a tonal difference between our work and their work. We tend not to go a blue as they do. [Off Book] is rated for adults but we…

McKenna: It’s only because we don’t know where it’s going to go and we don’t want to be limiting ourselves. We often have shows that you would be very safe bringing a 10-year-old to, but then oops, there was a song that was all about buttholes. At the beginning, people were like, “You know, this might be really big if you could guarantee it was PG.” And we can’t.

Reino: If your kid is cool, they can come.

Any other projects you want to mention?

McKenna: Zach and I are often performers with the internet streamer Dropout, which has become an amazing homebase playground for a lot of improv comedians. We absolutely adore doing stuff over there, and we are in development with them over a couple of projects. They have been kind enough to foster us as musical voices and keep finding ways for us to interject music.

And we just wrapped a movie that we’re in post for that has some original music. But because making musical projects has been such a hurdle— they’re always in development — we were like let’s make a non-musical something that’s scalable. So, we crowdfunded, wrote, starred in — and I directed — a movie called Mock Trial. One of the things Zach and I also have in common is that we did high school mock trial in California. So, we literally did the same cases. We’re in post for that right now, and Zach has written some great original music. But all the music is diegetic or in montage. It’s not a character breaking into song. But [the film] relies on improv and [harkens] back to those huge foundational Christopher Guest ensemble movies.

You’ve written for Rick and Morty, right?

Reino: Yeah. We were brought into write with Ryan Elder, who’s the main composer for Rick and Morty. He had a Dear Evan Hansen-esque song that he wanted to do.

McKenna: It was awesome to have a song in an episode of that series. It was also a very sad pandemic moment because they were talking about doing a bigger music tour.

Reino: They were going to do a Rick and Morty tour.

McKenna: And they were like we might want to fill out more music. We were in these early stages and then it was like, “Oh, never mind. It’s not going to happen.”  

Reino: We also were lucky enough to do some songs for the Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin TV show on Peacock. We wrote a couple of songs for that.

McKenna: Get your head around this. We also wrote original music for a baking competition show called Baking It on Peacock. That won us two WGA awards. So, we have two Birds for writing songs about pie for a baking show.

Reino: And about a scary reindeer and…

McKenna: A mint that’s at the bottom of your grandmother’s bag.

Reino: We were very much helped by the fact that that show was hosted by Andy Sandberg, Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler. So, there’s a lot of star power and extreme talent behind these awards, but we’ll take them anyway.

McKenna: Yeah, the [writing] staff won the awards. We have found ways to inject music wherever we go, and eventually the world will say yes to our full musical. Until then, we’ll be sneaky about it.

Reino: And Off Book is very much our baby and our creative answer to keeping our souls alive. No one can tell us to stop. It doesn’t get stuck in development.

McKenna: There are no notes.

Where do you two see yourselves in five years?

McKenna: I’m really hoping Pasadena.

Reino: Yeah, it’s a great neighborhood. You would be a great fit for Pasadena.

McKenna: I know. Thanks. Zach and I are a successful duo for many reasons, and one of them is that we share a front-facing humility and an inward monstrous cockiness.

Reino: Monstrous ego.

McKenna: Yeah, that we only show to each other and maybe our spouses — which is, “Yeah, we’ll probably have a Broadway musical. Yeah, we’ll probably also have a movie someday. We’ll probably win an Academy Award for best original song. These things will probably happen.” You have to have that delusion that you can do all those things.

Reino: The Mock Trial movie was a huge lesson that it’s important for creative professionals to seize the means of production and do it yourself and not have to wait for someone else to tell you yes. So, the five-year plan is to make more movies and musicals where no one can say, “No.”

This past year has been a real eye opener in terms of how much is possible. We spent the last six years building up a fan base with Off Book, and that fanbase then kickstarted this movie for us. We used that to go out to investors. They were like, “Oh, you’ve already got some money. We’ll give you some more.” Then hopefully we’ll deliver this movie that people will really, really like, and then that will open the next door and so on and so forth. So, houses in Pasadena, world domination, Broadway musical, several EGOTs maybe. We’ll see.