'Showstopper! The Improvised Musical’ to perform at Kingston's Rose Theatre
By Emily Dalton
12th Sep 2023 | Local Features
The incredible 'Showstopper! The Improvised Musical' is on a nationwide tour and is dancing its way to Kingston's Rose Theatre this Saturday 16 September.
Spontaneous musical comedy at its finest, it is the first ever long-form improv show to have a full West End run and to be nominated and win an Olivier Award.
Dylan Emery, co-founder of 'Showstopper!' said: "Without the audience we literally wouldn't have a show."
The improvised performance is a fully realised musical created on the spot from audience suggestions on the night.
No one is forced to do anything, but audiences are encouraged to get thinking what would make an epic musical. Think of all your favourite numbers and scenes from a musical and imagine them all in one show- that's the gist!
Improv is a form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of the performance is unplanned and spontaneous.
"It's incredibly freeing," Emery explained. "You're creating on the fly. You're saying: 'There's me, there's the other actor and we've only got each other, what can we make?'- which is fun."
Taking the improv up to the next level, Emery argues, is adding impromptu singing and dancing.
"Musical theatre improv is more disciplined and more focussed because it has to look like a musical," Emery said.
Although it's much harder work with adding choreography, collaborating with the and the band, sound engineer as well as the lighting engineer, it is ultimately more fun.
Emery added: "The roles that we get to play- really exciting and interesting characters- we would never get cast for in real life".
You will normally see Emery in the chair, making the decisions and collating the audience's ideas together to create from scratch, a one-of-a-kind musical. Emery said he normally asks the audience what musical they love, or what is a "cool" setting for a musical.
"As soon as one or two people start suggesting, everyone else's imaginations gets inspired so we get a bunch of ideas from the audience," Emery said. "When they vote they just know they are involved and that its their show, that they helped write."
Coming to Kingston's Rose theatre this weekend (16 September) Emery and his cast cannot wait to see what the audience come up with.
"We love going to regional different places because you learn about it," Emery said. "We get loads of references from the audience, like: famous local people, famous local landmarks, things that people do.
"It's really fun because you get a unique musical that's personally constructed to be Kingston's next hit musical."
A show is born
Appropriate to the genre, the show was spontaneously conceived. Emery and Adam Meggido were in the improvised Shakespeare show The School of Night which was run by the late great Ken Campbell.
A perfect pair: Meggido is a musical theatre performer and writes musicals while Emery himself is a musician as well as being an actor and director.
The two started brainstorming and spontaneously creating Shakespearean-esque songs within the show itself.
When Campbell realised the pair could do this, he asked them to perform the Shakespeare show different styles of music, like Nick Cave. Whilst they were doing this the duo realised, they could come up with good songs and thought maybe they could improvise an entire musical.
How can you rehearse for a show that is conjured up differently every night? "We don't really call it a rehearsal," Emery says. "We call it 'practise'.
"It's a bit like training for a football match so you do your keepy uppys and practising penalties, but you don't know what's going to happen on the day."
A test-running scenes, thinking how they would work with the in the style of Andrew Lloyd Webber, or matching the emotional journeys in Phantom of the Opera, or mixing a dance sequence in Singing in the Rain.
Constantly challenging each other and pushing themselves in different directions, the cast get learn how to communicate with each other and work together.
The group are long running, well known and renowned for their improvisation work. Most cast members have also received acclaim in their own right. The Showstoppers have been working on the show since 2008, figuring out how to improvise in increasingly esoteric styles, including musical, dance, straight theatre, and film genres to name but a few.
"The cast very much feels like being a family- albeit a slightly broken family sometimes," Emery adds cheekily.
Familiarising themselves with each other, the actors are almost part of a dance the selves: working out the steps to a story, what the next move is, learning when to change the tempo or direction.
Emery said: "When you have been acting with someone for a long time, you'll see them make a move- and everyone goes: 'We know you so well, we think we understand what you're going to do and we're going to start doing it immediately.' Like, miming opening a door and entering a ballroom, so the rest of the cast suddenly burst into dancing."
The immediacy of the performance is part of the challenge. But it is truly a collaborative space for both audience and actor. "One of the fundamentals in improv is the 'Yes, and' principle," Emery said. "Yes, to someone's idea, AND adding your own.
"You get just as much joy from the miscommunication as long as you absolutely embrace whatever does happen."
'Showstopper! The Improvised Musical' is set to perform at Kingston's Rose Theatre this Saturday 16 September.
With fourteen years as an Edinburgh Fringe must-see phenomenon, a BBC Radio 4 series, a critically acclaimed West End run and an Olivier Award to their name, The Showstoppers have delighted audiences across the globe with their ingenious blend of comedy, musical theatre and spontaneity.
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