Comparisons to past years will have to wait until 2010, but since I have about 20 minutes left on the children’s naps, I’ve got time for the bottom 10 of 2009. Enjoy:

10. Red Rubber Ball/Dictionary Soup, 1-31-09

After our fantastic January, this show reminded us that theater can be a fickle mistress. The shows themselves were great, especially Dictionary Soup, but evidently everyone had already been to the theater in January. Of course, Dictionary Soup is a group that has had trouble attracting audiences consistently - partly due to its 2009 2nd Friday slot, which was not a tremendous time for attracting people to the Roving Imp. And even though Dictionary Soup is our audience’s choice for #1 favorite show, I’ve had some audiences say they’re a little scared that DS will churn out a well done drama instead of a comedy. This is due mainly to a show which was a pretty amazing tale of a convict accused of murdering his brother. Amazing, but definitely more dark than a usual improv show. We’re switching things up in 2010, so hopefully we’ll give DS the love it deserves.

9. ‘Arold/Omega Directive,  3-28-09

Snowstorms keep audiences away. Actually, a very small amount of snow is worse, because people are scared of what might be later. That’s what happened here… a little snow = a little audience.

8. Red Rubber Ball, Dictionary Soup, 7-10-09

Poor RRB & DS… Perhaps not a winning combination.

7. Dial-A-Show, Dictionary Soup, 8-14-09

I think Keith doesn’t believe me when I tell him that we actually do have people visit the theater, and there is actually an audience. For such a quality show, DS should have throngs of fans. We’ll have to do something about that. We probably should have done something about that well before now.

6. Full Frontal Comedy/Biblioclast, 5-15-09

You know what else keeps audiences away? Thunderstorms with associated tornado warnings. We had a really well attended night the following evening.

5. FAT, 4-17/18-09

Martha Maggio’s original award-winning one-woman play was another show that deserved much more audience, and probably would have gotten it if more of us had been in town. The Chicago Improv festival happened at the exact same time, so not even I got to see this show, which was later described to me as “amazing.” Maybe we should do a combined FAT/Dictionary Soup night.

4. Improv Survivor Premiere, 1-30-09

Wow. That was a rough weekend. Was there snow or something? It was the very first regularly scheduled Friday show, and Improv Survivor substituted for Puppet Nation, which is a great idea that 95% of all improvisers are scared of.

3. Thursday Prime, 1st Thursdays January-May

OK, so technically there were five of these, but since the shows were free shows during the weekday, it didn’t seem right to punish them by listing them separately. They were a great experiment, and introduced the Roving Imp to a few new folks. Since RI switched up its rehearsals in June, there was no longer a slot available for this Thursday show… which was OK, since very few people made it out anyway.

2. Improv Survivor/Biblioclast: Spaceballs, 7-3-09

The shows were good, but look at the date… the Friday directly before Independence Day. Holidays are never good for attendance, and this one definitely wasn’t. Maybe one day I’ll learn to just not have a show… if the desire to create art doesn’t overcome me, as it usually does.

1. RI’s Kingdom of the Crystal Imp/Dictionary Soup, 4-10-09

Another Friday, another Dictionary Soup show, and the second half of our anniversary celebration. The first half of it went great, but it seems that people weren’t so psyched about the sequel. We ended up converting the show into a near-jam, as the bulk of the small audience had performed with us before anyway. Great show… but we did it basically for ourselves.

The good news - the number of small audiences is down by a lot over 2008. Average audience size has doubled, although there’s still plenty of room for improvement. And Dictionary Soup has nowhere to go but up.