Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

Synopsis

A writer has just one hour to create a hit show to impress his producer. Stuck for ideas, he takes audience suggestions for a title, storylines and musical styles that they'd like to see in the show. The Showstoppers then create a musical from scratch based around that structure. Utterly unpredictable, frequently side-splittingly funny, packed with drama and featuring dazzling dance routines and catchy melodies, Showstopper! leaves delighted audiences singing all the way home.

Our Review:

4 November 2008

Showstopper! is an improvised musical playing each Monday night at the King’s Head – ominously re-branded, I note, as “the King’s Head Theatre and Bar” – right through to next March. By my calculation, we shall have something like 18 brand new musicals by then, enough to silence the doubters of the future health of the genre on the fringe.

Except, of course, no such devised musical will ever enter the repertoire. The point of improvisation is not to create important new work, but to reveal the adeptness or otherwise of the actors in getting themselves out of a spot and from point A to point B. Genius sometimes comes into it, if you have a John Sessions or a Mark Lockyer on the bill. And one or two of the Sticking Place company come close.

Some of these performers worked with the late, great Ken Campbell on this show in Edinburgh, when the starting point was a critical review of a musical that didn’t exist, except in the review. ...

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Latest User Review

Theatresquirrel - 4 November 2008:

Michael Coveney, as usual, is way out of touch. You don't go to an entirely spontaneously devised musical for a finished article, doh. And yet as I was there last night, I can report Showstopper is definitely a much more accomplished musical undertaking than most - it had, for me (and clearly for everyone else there save MC), more melody, more wit and more ingenuity than most musicals that takes months and years to write. And unlike Forbidden Broadway, which requires an almost clubbish knowledge of the minutiae of current shows, Showstopper revels in many glorious and cringeworthy elements of the musical genre that are universally recognisable. It's by far the most entertaining thing I've seen on the fringe all year, and I can only marvel at how they do it....

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