Hypnosis and improvisation are, Colin Mochrie smiles, “the two art forms in the world that are most liable to be greeted with skepticism.” Combine them, and you’ve built a show that almost encourages audiences not to believe what they’re watching. This is the gamble at the heart of Mochrie and hypnotist Asad Mecci’s show HYPROV (pronounced HIP-rov). After a decade of sold-out runs from Edinburgh to Off-Broadway to Las Vegas, it’s a gamble that keeps paying off.
The premise is disarmingly simple: Mecci puts a group of audience volunteers into a hypnotic trance, then hands them off to Mochrie. The quick-witted Canadian improviser best known for eleven seasons of Whose Line Is It Anyway? then joins them in improvising spontaneous scenes. Mochrie has never seen any of them before. There’s no script, no rehearsal, and no safety net.
Yes, it’s real.
“Yes It’s Real” is the tongue-in-cheek name of the current HYPROV tour, which arrives in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on November 6, 2026 before other southern Ontario and Maritime dates and a US leg. The name is a direct response to the skepticism both men know intimately. Mochrie recalls viewer mail from Whose Line insisting that the show was scripted: “I could see you reading the cue cards!” a letter might read. His challenge to doubters was, “Transcribe it. Then imagine trying to read that off cue cards!” — the nonsensicality would be impossible to perform. With improvisation, indisputably, “the magic is being there in the moment” — and it is built live, in that moment.
Hypnosis has also spent decades fending off accusations of fakery. Both men know from firsthand experience that hypnosis is real — Mecci has used it to treat his own insomnia, and once hypnotized Mochrie to help him finish a writing project. (Mochrie, the rueful owner of “a drawer full of first acts,” notes drily that he failed to specify that he needed to “finish writing something of incredible value.” Mochrie did finish writing the piece successfully. But it sank without a trace.) Because they know the hypnosis is real, they treat it with seriousness. “You’ll never see us ask a participant to bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken. We avoid those tropes,” notes Mecci. Nor will they ever mock the hypnotized or have them do anything demeaning.
What they will do under hypnosis is an especially unpredictable and uniquely funny form of uninhibited improvisation – in scenes, with Colin as their partner.
From one cold email to life flashing before your eyes
HYPROV was born from an unlikely pitch. In 2015, Mecci, then an established stage hypnotist, emailed Mochrie cold through his website, proposing a collaboration. Mochrie, who has spent four decades seeking out challenges, found the idea of improvising with hypnotized audience members terrifying. That made it a “Yes.” “To stay sharp, I’m always looking for things that take me out of my comfort zone,” he explains. “This certainly fit the bill.”
Asked how confident he was that the concept would actually work, Mecci confesses he had no idea. Mochrie, mock-surprised, protests, “You didn’t say any of this at the time!” The two began workshopping in the John Candy Theatre at Toronto’s Second City. Now, with co-creator and producer Jeff Andrews and tour producer Sarah Power, they’re playing Roy Thomson Hall. Trance scales!
The early shows taught them something counterintuitive. Mochrie had expected his role would be “traffic control,” managing hypnotized chaos. They discovered instead that participants who are under hypnosis “can do anything, but you just have to keep it simple.” You can tell a participant “You’re in love with Colin,” and watch improvisational magic unfold. But ask them “to replace every ‘s’ with a ‘p’”— a task requiring conscious skill that exceeds their experience and capability — and the trance falters.
So Mecci and Mochrie keep the setups spare, then roll with whatever comes. And even after more than 40 years of improvisation, Mochrie avers that “There is ALWAYS something that surprises.” He notes drily that “a certain low-level terror is helpful” when performing. “I’ve heard it described how when you are experiencing intense terror and your life flashes before your eyes, it’s because your mind is rapidly downloading all of your experience and trying to see if ANYTHING in there is useful to help you get out of the current situation. That’s HYPROV.”
Mecci, who facilitates the hypnosis and guides the volunteers, has a vicarious terror of his own to contend with. He watches the hypnotized in action, and wonders frequently how Colin will get out of the situations they put him in. “Remember,” he notes, “these people don’t know the rules of improv. Whatever Colin says, they’re supposed to say, ‘Yes, and…’ But they say ‘No!’ And they ask questions!” Mochrie is truly working without a net, which guarantees unpredictability and fun … and ensures that no two shows are ever the same.
Getting out of your own way
The success of HYPROV rests on an interesting paradox. The signs Mecci screens for after hypnotizing the night’s volunteers — sluggish movement, and certain face and vocal changes — sound like the opposite of what makes a great improviser. Yet under hypnosis, ordinary people become spontaneous, unfiltered, and frequently flat-out hilarious. How can this be?
“They are freed from inhibition,” Mecci says simply. “They get out of their own way.” He likens the experience to the kind of trance you enter when you’re watching a really scary horror movie — where you become so involved and suggestible that your heart races, and you experience the jump-scares as though you are the movie’s protagonist.
On the HYPROV stage, this trance state means that participant responses flow faster, unmediated by self-consciousness or calculation. This raises the question: when a line lands and brings the house down, whose line is it anyway? Is the real author the volunteer; or Mecci, for the power of his suggestion; or Mochrie for leading them there with his setup lines?
“My setup is pretty simple,” Mochrie demurs. “It’s really them. They’ve been freed up to be fully themselves.” And as the two men go on to explain, that can lead not just to great fun, but something close to revelation.
The hidden singer
Thinking again of the tour title “Yes It’s Real,” I ask each man for a favourite show moment that could never have been scripted. Both men answer instantly — but differently.
Mecci’s is delicate: a hypnotized man, told by Mecci that he was in love with Mochrie, got down on one knee, grabbed Colin’s hand — and was stunned to see a wedding ring. His despondence was total, and his subsequent inquiries were hilariously and heartbreakingly sincere. “The detail was just so lovely and unpredictable,” Mecci recalls.
Mochrie’s is something else. During a show, they asked a man to sing like James Brown. To their wonderment, he delivered an extraordinary performance. After the show, he approached Mochrie to say, “Thank you so much for the opportunity.” It turned out that his family, who were with him at the show, had never before heard him sing. They had no idea he possessed this talent — until hypnosis freed him to reveal it.
It was “so moving,” Mochrie says quietly, “to think that we had given him this opportunity to get out of his own way and show them this hidden aspect of himself.”
What to expect at the show
I close our conversation by asking the two men what audiences should expect from HYPROV.
“A feel-good, goofy show that’s incredibly funny AND inspiring,” Mecci promises. One that illustrates powerfully what people can do “when they stop over-thinking things.” It’s also “family-friendly — you must be eighteen to be hypnotized, but we’ve had lots of children in the audience.” (The worst that’s ever happened is “a little language” from uninhibited improvisers, but that’s an outlier.)
It’s “the kind of thing we can probably all use more of right now,” Mochrie smiles.
Two doubted art forms walk into a theatre. What walks out might just be someone you didn’t know was in there.
HYPROV: Improv Under Hypnosis plays at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday, November 6, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets available at roythomsonhall.com.
And if you’re still skeptical, check out this CTV News article written by a skeptic who interviewed a HYPROV participant.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
