Off Book: The Improvised Musical

Jessica McKenna and Zach Reino create a completely improvised musical in an attempt to combat the notion that musicals should be “carefully crafted” or “thought out at all.”

Zach Reino and Jessica McKenna are a versatile musical comedy duo. They wrote and composed music for the WGA award-winning Peacock Series Baking It starring Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg. The duo has also written songs and musical sketches for the hit animation show Rick and Morty, Party Over Here (a Fox sketch show produced by The Lonely Island), the Peacock series Pitch Perfect: Bumper In Berlin, Buzzfeed, FunnyOrDie and Nickelodeon. Zach and Jess are currently developing TV and Film projects with Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions, David Wain (The State, Role Models, Wanderlust) and Elizabeth Banks’ Brownstone Productions. They also created and starred in Serious Music, a digital series for ABC.

Their weekly improvised musical podcast Off Book has been praised by various online publications including Indie Wire, USA Today, Parade, AV Club and Splitsider and been featured at Comedy Central’s Clusterfest Festival, Moontower, the world renowned Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, and the Netflix Is A Joke Festival in LA. Zach and Jess were listed as one of Vulture’s “Comedians You Should and Will Know” and in early 2019 they released their first full-length musical comedy album The Calendar Album with Comedy Dynamics.