Noah Gregoropoulos, influential Chicago improv performer and teacher, dies at 63

Noah Gregoropoulos, an influential actor and teacher who helped build the skills of generations of Chicago improvisers, has died at 63.

He died of cancer Friday morning at his Lake View home, said his longtime friend and employer, iO co-founder Charna Halpern.

As a performer, Gregoropoulos brought his droll intelligence to hundreds of Chicago shows over more than three decades, as a member of the iO team Carl and the Passions, as a regular at its “Armando Diaz Experience” shows and in the cast of the groundbreaking 1990s show “Jazz Freddy.”

He also was a de facto artistic director at iO, teaching its top-level improv class and helping Halpern arrange team and shows.

Halpern said Friday that, after the 1999 death of Del Close, Gregoropoulos “really helped take his place” as an artistic visionary for the theater.

“Late Show With Stephen Colbert” writer Brian Stack, a former iO student and performer, said his friend and frequent castmate Gregoropoulos “had a gift for making people better and inspiring them to do better work than they thought they could do.”

Stack recalled a night when he performed with a team Gregoropoulos was coaching. The audience responded well, but “afterward Noah was like, ‘I hope you’re proud of yourselves.’ He knew we were going for easy laughs that night. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s right.’ We weren’t really pushing ourselves. We were falling back on our bag of tricks. And he made us better by making us strive for more, to go for the right kind of laughs.”

He was a principled teacher and performer whose focus was on the artistry of long-form improv, rather than the humor, said Chicago improviser Paul Grondy, another friend who often shared stages with Gregoropoulos,

As iO’s successor to Close, who taught improvisers how to build their ideas in a structure called The Harold, Gregoropoulos “took over the idea of guiding his classes into the creation of a brand new improv long form in that last level of classes before they were put on a Harold team.”

While he dabbled in big-time entertainment on occasion — writing for ABC’s sitcom “Dharma and Greg” for a season, and turning up on TBS’ “My Boys” and FX’s “Fargo” — Gregoropoulos largely focused his efforts on Chicago.

At Second City he directed the theater’s first long-form improv show, “Lois Kaz,” in 1994 and a 1998 revue at the e.t.c. theater called “If The White House Is A-Rockin’, Don’t Come A-Knockin’.”

“He always had a lot of artistic integrity about the work,” Stack said. “Sometimes it’s hard for people like that to compromise and do things they don’t feel good about, or they don’t have their heart in fully. I think Noah was able to do the work he really wanted to do in Chicago and I’m really happy that he was able to do that. There are certain realities of the showbiz world where people aren’t always doing the work that they’re proud of. But I can’t think of anything that I saw Noah do that he would have been ashamed to show people.”