A brand new musical every night, made up, right here, right now! That’s the bold claims of this talented troupe of improvisers and last night they kept their promise.

This is a strong mix of traditional improv games ‘do it in the style of.. etc’ and musical improv from a team who are obviously very comfy working together.

The show starts with the on stage ‘narrator’ having a phone call from his ‘director’ who needs a new musical, the audience are then cajoled to provide a theme, place and a few familiar musical styles ( Bernstein, Hendrix, Mozart etc) which are written up on an A-board.  The audience get to shout/vote on the idea they like the best so there’s a real feel of ‘being part of the night’ and this interaction is  cleverly handled by the narrator throughout the show.  

Having a talented (& loud) table with me, of Jazz impresarios, Blues singers and DJ’s we were determined to ensure our choice made it, and it did. A musical about ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ called ‘Stoned’ off you go then….

Even though it's made up on the spot this is a proper musical with duets, heartbreaking solos, big choral dance numbers, a protagonist’s journey and the final resolution so needed for a good musical.  Once the troupe had worked out who was going to be the lead with some subtle on stage improv magic it started to gain momentum, the opening scene in a slave market was funny and catchy and was cleverly worked back into the music throughout the show by the endlessly inventive keyboard player. 

I’d like to review the musical, but that’s not really the point here, although the plaintiff slave song ‘some chains’ got the audience in it’s grasp from the first notes. Quickly followed by the mandraxy Gilbert and Sullivan chorus song, cruel? Not quite but it looked it from the audiences point of view.  A wonderful parody of Sarah Lloyd Webber and her ex’s style for a trio of love song was very funny as was a Handel death aria where the tragic heroine was stoned to death in slow-mo.  

Some quick and very funny walk on jokes; a fan that became a fluttering bat, a scarlet boa turned into spurts of murderous blood were very funnily handled and the audience loved them. The Narrator used his interruptions to jog along some looser moments transforming them into very funny scetches; introducing Pinter into a flaccid love scene was a masterstroke.  It’s a clever way of tucking in the more raggy edges of impro, the missed cues, lighting glitches and continuity errors that go with improv can trip it up sometimes but here the ‘Narrator’ allowed these to be seamlessly blended back into the show, to develop into running jokes and to (seemingly) torment the improvisers to get the best out of them. All done with mirrors & a knowing wink but the audience loved it.

The high point of the evening was an acoustic Hendrix love song ‘ I did that for you’, which brought the house down and was spot on. It’s a pity that improvised musicals only have the one outing as they always throw up a classic.  The evening was nicely wrapped up with a full cast reprise of the opening song, nice and slick and the audience clapped along.

‘Showstoppers’ are on tour at the moment, details here:

This is a good strong team of improvisers at ease in a genre they have probably made their own, with a few good tricks mixed in to keep it rolling along at a nice pace. My table had a good night and the only criticisms were that perhaps the team (who obviously had great range) were a little modest in their flights of fantasy and ‘safe’ in their musical choices, the keyboard player could have gone a lot wilder than he did, but perhaps that’s the key to keeping such a mixed audience on board, and the narrator kept fishing for ‘interesting’ choices rather than going with the first one offered up. Quality control perhaps?

The real, killer test of any musical is if people leave humming the tunes, and the happily entertained full Komedia audience certainly did that.

Showstoppers! are back in Brighton on the 21st May at the Komedia, book here: