Though the show remains one of Samuels’ personal favorites and received a great audience response, it closed the same night it opened. This wasn’t because of lack of interest. The show was a part of Samuels’ brainchild, Baby Wants Candy, a comedy group that presents completely improvised musicals and never show the same performance twice.

Samuels, 43, founded Baby Wants Candy in Chicago in 1997 and the company soon spread to New York City and began touring all around the world. At the peak of this success, Samuels is moving to Los Angeles to expand the company even further and begin pursuing other media outlets such as television and film.

Samuels counts on the huge number of performers in Los Angeles to round out his company and feels Baby Wants Candy will thrive there just as it has in Chicago and New York City. While there, he will be expanding his own theatrical repertoire by pitching ideas for television shows and movies that he hopes to have some acting role in.

In high school Samuels’ theatre experience was limited to operating the spotlight for shows like “Mame” and “Annie Get Your Gun,” and he admits when asked to join an improv group in college, the idea was terrifying and inconceivable to him. He specifically mentions an exercise in which people would line up in two opposite lines eventually meeting their partner to perform a scene once they reached the front.

“I was so nervous every time I would get close to the front, it was so ridiculous. I would come up with [an excuse], ‘I have to go to the bathroom!’ then be at the back of the line again,” Samuels said eagerly, perched on a chair with his calm yet animated voice. “I finally got into a scene, and it was really, really fun.”

Ever since then Samuels knew he would be combining his new love of theatre with his desire to study business. While attending Stanford University’s business school, Samuels’ focus swayed more to theatre especially after his mother, a very passionate concert pianist, passed away.

“I went to business school, and my mom died my second year there, which is hilarious!” Samuels joked. “No, it was hard. It was very heartbreaking, and I think I really found refuge in theatre and drama.”

Samuels business background and love of theatre spurred him to start his own companies, Spark Creative and Baby Wants Candy. This allowed him to create something his friends struggling in the arts could take advantage of. Now with Baby Wants Candy, Samuels dons both hats, acting as a producer and a player in the show. While Samuels feels this creates a challenge for how he critiques the other players, his colleagues disagree.

“It’s not hard on my ego to get notes from him because he’s someone I really respect,” said Erica Elam, a player who has been with Baby Wants Candy since 2005. She respects not only to his leadership but also his skills as an improv performer.

“Al’s the king of entering a scene with a hilarious bit,” Elam said. “Two people will be having a scene, you won’t really know who they are, and Al will enter as the janitor and say, ‘Excuse me, Margaret Thatcher, you have a call on line one,’ and now that person has to be Margaret Thatcher for the rest of the show.”

Respect for Samuels goes beyond professional realm. Joanna Feldman, the associate producer of Baby Wants Candy who has only been with the company for a little over a year, recalls a time last year when a friend of hers was in the hospital with cancer. Samuels visited Feldman’s friend at the hospital and sent her flowers.

“He’s as nice as a person can be,” Feldman said. “He really is real all the time.”

Apart from the attention of his colleagues, Samuels easily catches the eye of audience members in the way he performs and carries himself on stage. Dylan Schaefer, a Columbia College Chicago theatre student who is studying improv, has gone to almost every Chicago performance since February. He pegs Samuels as an easy favorite.

“He’s so knowledgeable and the best improvisers are very smart in general,” Schaefer said. “It’s evident he holds the show together.”

Emily Dorezas, Baby Wants Candy’s executive producer, agrees that Samuels is a great performer and is often looked to to wrap up the show and tie up loose ends. Dorezas also sees Samuels as someone who makes both the cast and the audience feel welcome during every performance.

Feldman also sees Samuels with a welcoming connection to the audience and admits that sometimes she feels like he’s an extra audience member who has an inside joke going with the audience while on stage. As far as making the cast and crew feel welcome, Samuels loves group hangouts and Baby Wants Candy bonding, according to Feldman. There is a family feel within the group.

“We had a scary movie night, and Al brought snacks,” Feldman said with a smile. “We refer to the cast as babies, and Al really acts as their dad.”

As Samuels moves onto the next step in his journey, it is obvious he will be missed in Chicago by colleagues and fans alike. He has faith that he is leaving behind seasoned performers and a thriving improv company.

“You plant some seeds in the ground and you don’t know which ones are going to grow,” Samuels said. “And then you watch, and you’re like, oh wow, that one’s really growing and its growing faster and bigger and in ways you never realized. It’s really heartwarming in that way.”

Frandsen was the winner of Brita’s Filter For Good green room contest, a national competition rewarding the college student with the greenest apartment with two tickets to Sundance.

“I developed my greenness on my own,” Frandsen said. The contest didn’t motivate this lifestyle change, it was instead a way for her to showcase her green lifestyle already in progress. “Usually it saves me money, and it’s just a matter of changing your routine.”

Frandsen has been living totally green since moving into her own apartment this year. She admitted that in the past having roommates hindered her from living in a totally environmentally friendly way, but now it is all simply habit. Her green lifestyle choices range from unplugging appliances to not flushing the toilet to getting rid of food scraps in worm composts and, of course, using a Brita water filter.

Her studio apartment lends a hand to her greenness by providing floor to ceiling windows which let in light throughout the day, even on cloudy days, eliminating the need to use electricity for light throughout the morning and afternoon. The furniture, found through dumpster diving, are colorful additions to the room, with a Japanese room divider and a bamboo plant over 3 feet tall adding artistic flair to the apartment. A drying rack used in place of a drier and two worm compost bins are reminders of the room’s environmentally friendly-nature.

“Things to me that I don’t even think about my friends are like, ‘how can you do that?’” Frandsen said. Once she discovered the advertisement for the contest on the sidebar of the Web site Pandora Radio, all her friends encouraged her to enter, knowing she already lived that way.

“Most of all we wanted to know what college students are doing because we know they are some of the leaders in making small changes,” said Lisa Ptak, the public relations representative for Brita, a company that promotes the use of their filtered water in reusable bottles instead of forcing customers to buy plastic water bottles. She said the main purpose of the contest was to reward students who are already engaging in a green lifestyle. Brita recently has been giving out $50,000 worth of eco-grants to further reward green college students.

“When Britt told me about the contest we rearranged her room, and I helped take over 50 pictures,” said Erica Ravi, Frandsen’s girlfriend and her plus-one for the trip to Sundance.

Entering the contest required a photo showcasing the green qualities of the room, as well as the creative decor, and a 100-word essay describing the actions taken towards a greener apartment. Once entered, 10 finalists were chosen and the overall winner was based on a voting process that took place on Filter For Good’s Facebook page.

According to Frandsen, she was one of the last to enter in order to ensure everything about her entry was perfect. The first day of the six day contest she was in second place until 7 p.m., and after that she never dropped down from first place. However, she never felt fully confident she had won until it was officially announced.

“There was never a vote tally so I never knew how close it was,” Frandsen said. “On Saturday night [when voting closed] it was like, ‘We won! Maybe…’”

The following Tuesday Frandsen got a confirmation call that she had won the trip as well as a Flip video camera and a Brita prize package, including a Brita filter, a faucet mount and five Nalgene bottles. She was then debriefed on her trip to Sundance and certain responsibilities she would have once there as contest winner.

“Brittany will be doing updates from Sundance with her Flip cam, and the footage will be shared on the Filter For Good Web site and the Facebook page,” Ptak said.

“I think [Frandsen] deserved it, but I think she could have tried to be more green,” said Daniel Burg, a student from Idaho who got fifth place in the contest. “I think it’s cool to bike everywhere and not use water bottles, but you need to have more.”

Malia Griggs, 20, a student from Columbia, S.C. and the third place contestant, wishes Frandsen the best of luck on her trip to Sundance and doesn’t feel upset that Frandsen beat her. Unlike Burg, she felt Frandsen was going above and beyond with some of her green choices.

“I was really impressed by the stuff people were doing,” Griggs said. “I was glad to know there were other people who were interested in the environment.”

The schedule of films playing at Sundance was recently posted, and Frandsen will be picking out films as part of her preparation for the trip, hoping to see two a day for the four days she is there. Once in Utah, Frandsen will have access to all things Brita, including the Brita Green Room where the filmmakers and stars will wait to be interviewed for the Sundance Channel.

“Ideally, I want to finish my Web site and hand out business cards for it there,” Frandsen said, taking advantage of the fact that she will be a film student at a major film festival.

Frandsen is grateful that Brita acknowledged her green living and encourages others to do the same.

“It’s pretty simple and you can do as much as you want to,” Frandsen said. “It’s as simple as just adding the step of unplugging the computer after turning it off.”

The Sundance Film Festival will take place from Jan. 21-31 and Frandsen’s videos from Brita’s Green Room and the streets of Park City will be on Brita’s Filter For Good Web site at www.filterforgood.com.

Blasco’s piece reflects constant construction and constant growth, from traditional Shanghai to a modernized Shanghai, causing fragmentation of the city. Visibly holding the piece together are wooden planks along with bright orange clamps. He shows Shanghai is not trying to disguise its development.

This piece and the ideas it represents are part of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography entitled “Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture.” The exhibit features international artists representing the modernization of Shanghai as a city as well as its people through photography, video and sculpture.

Another prominent piece in the gallery by artist Shi Guorui shows the traditional, original cityscape and buildings of Shanghai juxtaposed with the modern, almost futuristic buildings being built across a river from one another. This piece was created using a camera obscura technique which entails shining a light through a small hole and allowing it to reflect an entire image into a room. This technique serves well to the exhibit’s title, according to Allison Grant, the education outreach coordinator at the museum, who calls it “a literal reversed image.”

“It really reflects what’s going on in the split of culture,” said Grant. “It is a literal reversed image, there is a literal split.”

The varying viewpoints of Shanghai’s young and old are shown through the work of father and son, Xu Xixian and Xu Jianrong, who photographed the same locations in Shanghai just two decades apart. A modern photograph showing the traffic filled streets of Shanghai is layered above a photograph of the same location as a sidewalk, with another modern photograph depicting the completed Shanghai skyline layered above a shorter skyline with unfinished building, though even the modern photographs possess an aged quality to them.

The difference between the photographs show not only how far Shanghai has come to modernization based on its own history, but how much farther they must go to reach Western standards of modern.

“That [piece] points out the lag time China’s having right now,” Grant said.

While the exhibit contains primarily photographs, artists such as Zhang Qing and the artistic collaborative group Speedism incorporated video and animation.

Zhang’s piece concentrated on the youth of Shanghai adapting to the close quarters left by traditional Shanghai architecture. The video depicts a group of young men attempting to play a game of soccer in their small three-room apartment, cramped in the space to the point where the game must not only be played on top of pieces of furniture, but practically on top of one another.

On the other hand, Speedism uses digital animation to represent the ideas of China’s past culture into an exaggeration of the newly formed China the young people are envisioning for themselves. As Grant puts it, they are incorporating “symbols of culture to create a false narrative of what it means to be a young person in China today.”

A series of pictures by Yang Fudong incorporates this same idea of false narrative for China’s youth. His photographs depict a young woman living, to Chinese standards, quite lavishly. It appears as if her image was stolen from a classic movie or television star, and the series plays out as a movie or television narrative. The woman is presented finely made up with a cigarette in hand and the costuming of a typical western starlet. This is a concept also familiar in the Western world, proving a movement of Western modernization in Shanghai youth.

These pieces show, according to Grant, a “performance of identity,” the Chinese youth enacting what they believe their identities should be as young people and not accepting the identity laid out by China’s past, as identities of Shanghai shift and the gap widens between the values of the young and old.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography is located at 600 S. Michigan Ave. and is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m., and Sundays noon to 5 p.m. The exhibit continues through Dec. 23. Admission is free.