Long and humorous road brings Dan Reitz to new venue

By Jason Pomietlasz

There are moments that can help define you. 

For Dan Reitz, one of them would be a frozen bit of time at Syracuse University with the Zamboni Revolution, a ragtag student improv group. 

The suggestion came from the audience to do a scene in front of a sold-out student union crowd. 

The members on stage just stared at each other. The audience stared at them. 

The crowd was rapt. The performers were frozen. Then Reitz mimed getting something out of a refrigerator. It didn’t necessarily go well. Yet Reitz was all in.

How far in? Well, after 20 years performing and teaching improv, mostly in New York City, Reitz has decided  it’s the right time to open what he calls Buffalo’s first full time improv, sketch and alternative comedy theater and training facility. It’s Buffalo Improv House, at 255 Great Arrow Avenue, Suite 207, inside the Pierce Arrow Complex. 

The grand opening starts today (Sept. 6, 2024) and runs through Sunday, with a full slate of events planned, including a ribbon cutting ceremony Saturday at 1 p.m. There will even be politicians (at least New York State Senator Sean Ryan) coming along for the ride.  

It’s the culmination of a ride that has included Reitz working with Adam Sandler and writer/director Robert Smigel on the animated feature film “Leo” (he provided some of the musical arrangements and some voice). He spent years touring with the Baby Wants Candy comedy troupe. 

But before that, it started with growing up in Amherst. He was basketball tall, but found his niche in music. He was  a performer in the Grammy All-American High School Jazz Ensemble, won Outstanding Trombone Solo at the Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington Festival and several national composition awards.

He remembers babysitting his sisters and watching “The State” on MTV and  feeling there was something anarchic about it that he liked. He also considers Monty Python movies, Saturday Night Live and Mr. Bean early influences. While attending Williamsville East High School, Reitz and his friends started filming their own comedy sketches. 

Reitz attended Syracuse University on a music scholarship, but he knew he wanted to be involved in comedy in some way. There weren’t any improv groups or clubs on campus, so he started one with two fellow students who seemed like-minded.  One of them was Nick Gurewitch, who went on to start one of the first viral webcomics, “The Perry Bible Fellowship.” That was the start of Zamboni Revolution, which still exists today. 

He admits they had no clue what they were doing. Their only reference to improv was the television show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” which is mostly short-form improv games. It was 2001, so there weren’t a lot of Internet resources and they continued to fly blind until someone eventually got a book of improv games.

After about two years, Zamboni Revolution brought in the Second City Touring Company for a little training and it was eye opening. Reitz recalls thinking, “Wow, there is some art behind the performance.” 

Life itself is a bit of improv, and Reitz’s life has taken some twists and turns. He taught briefly in Buffalo after college, but felt the call of improv in New York City, where some of his Zamboni Revolution comrades were involved with the Upright Citizens Brigade improv group. 

He made the move with his girlfriend and, in classic NYC style, got an apartment that cost way too much and saw his relationship fell apart two months later.

But Reitz took his first ever actual improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade. His first class taught him that he really didn’t know anything. 

He found The PIT, a New York City theater on 29th Street that runs improv jams, the improv equivalent to open mic night where anyone can participate. It held an event called the improdome, a three-on-three “competition,” where a winner was chosen based on audience response. Reitz was put on a team with two other people and won that night. 

He even met his wife in an improv class. Annie Moor remembers meeting Reitz in a level 4 improv class at the PIT in 2010.  When he was ready to move back to Buffalo, she made a hard pitch for him to stay. He ended up living there for 12 years. 

Reitz still had his share of off nights performing. There is something powerful about being able to live in the moment when you don’t have an idea, which can happen to the best of improvisers. 

And having one too many beers can lead to a weird night, which happened to him one night where he started a scene with dialogue from a Monty Python skit where people were falling from buildings. When his scene partners tried to take the scene in a different direction, he just doubled down and kept quoting Monty Python – a definite no in improv, where the “yes, and … “ rule rules. 

MUSICAL IMPROV

Within improv, there is a specialty that took off … and just in time for Reitz. It’s music improv, which goes beyond simply improvising a song off an audience suggestion. 

The musical improv scene can include making up songs on the spot with music accompaniment or it can include improvising entire musicals, and it was just happening in New York. For an improv artist with musical skills, it was a great time. He got a call as a rehearsal pianist for a musical improv group. 

Then he received a call from Frank Spitznagel, the musical director at Magnet Theater and piano accompanist for many improv musical groups. 

“It felt like getting a call from a Mafia don, that’s what it felt like at least,” Reiz said. “Like ‘Oh you’re playing in my scene, you have to come to my house to prove yourself.’ That was the vibe I got from the phone call. Turns out that wasn’t the case, but….” 

Reitz went to his house and Spitznagel had hired a professional singer and told Reitz, “I’m going to show you what I do and you’re going to show me what you do.” Reitz got an accelerated class in playing piano for musical improv. 

Spitznagel liked Reitz’s style and put him on a sub list since he was unable to keep up with the demand for musical improv. 

Once he was put on the sub list, within a short time Reitz was rehearsing with half the musical improv teams in the city. 

He started playing with the troupe Baby Wants Candy, whose longtime musical director was about to leave. Reitz started touring with them on the college circuit. Suddenly he was flying all over the country. For the next eight years, he was the group’s main piano player for shows east of Chicago. 

It was a boom era for musical improv. Reitz was playing seven or eight shows a week. 

Reitz also became involved with  “Your Love, Our Musical,” a long-form improvised musical where a couple from the audience is interviewed and performers create a fully improvised musical about that couple’s love story. They shot a pilot based on the show and were about to shoot another one when Covid happened and everything came to a screeching halt. 

Right before things were shutting down, Reitz got the opportunity to work on the Sandler musical movie “Leo” through Smigel. 

Smigel, SNL writer and creator of Triumph the Insult Dog, and Reitz became friends through mutual improv friends. Smigel was a fan of “Your Love,” and Reitz musically directed the pilot episode of the “Triumph the Insult Dog” podcast. 

Smigel would come to Reitz’s music studio in NYC and they finished collaborating over the phone with Smigel singing his ideas into the phone and Reitz creating the music from that. The original concept for the movie was more of a musical than the final product turned out to be, so a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor. But Smigel, a musical theater nerd, is hoping to turn “Leo” into a stage musical where all the original songs would come back. 

“Very cool experience. Probably a once in a lifetime experience,” Reitz said. He found himself talking to Sandler over the phone several times and they bonded over their love of hockey. 

HEADING BACK TO BUFFALO

With the pandemic in bloom, the mass exodus from New York City began. With no extended family there and a child to raise, things got more daunting. 

Reitz and Moor came back to Buffalo to check the housing market and ended up putting an offer on a house that weekend. 

As things started reopening, he was missing the community of improv so he put up what he calls a beacon. He created a website called Buffalo Improv House and offered a free intro class. That led to a level 1 class. That led to more classes.  A lot of the people who have taken the intro class over the past two years are still around and part of BIH in some way. 

Reitz decided to try to bring what he was doing in New York City to Buffalo. With the demand for classes increasing, he started thinking that it was time for his own dedicated space. 

Reitz is always thinking about “stage picture.” It’s something he harps on when teaching class. But now it’s carried even further. He’s thinking of the audience’s experience from door to exit. 

 Moor was very aware just how much work would go into opening their own theater, so she strove to make sure they were  finding the right space and not just something that was available. 

Moor said, “I’m aware that our community had grown to a point where we would have the kind of outpouring of help and love that we have now received. We would not have been able to do this alone, and the faculty, staff, volunteers and devoted community members have made it as easy as it was ever going to be.” 

There is no one demographic for people who take improv classes, but there are threads. This writer spoke to a lot of people who have attended classes at BIH, and a common theme is community. Sandra  Cimbricz took a class at BIH on a whim after a co-worker told her she had signed up for one. 

Cimbricz said what she had gotten out of the experience was “serious fun, great new friends and access to a trove of high-caliber instructors and classes. And I’ve reconnected to my theater roots as well.” 

Reitz has learned a bit about how to make that happen through the years, even when he was freezing on that Syracuse student union stage. 

Bombing in improv is different from bombing in stand-up. When bombing in stand-up, the advice is to slow down, but in improv you can return to the reality of the scene and acknowledge what’s off from that reality. 

Scenes usually don’t work because elements of the base reality aren’t defined enough or elements that are incongruous aren’t addressed. So defining those things is a way to save a scene. 

In a bigger sense, what Reitz and Moor are doing is defining and creating a scene, building on the base created by Buffalo’s existing improv scene with groups such as ComedySportz and WNY Improv.  

In defining a scene, they’re giving it context which creates expectations; you can subvert those expectations, which is where the comedy can come from. 

Buffalo Improv House hopes to be that place. 

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Jason Pomietlasz is a writer, aspiring comedian and a contributor to The Buffalo Hive.