Imagine if you could go to the theatre and help create the show you were seeing. Imagine throwing ideas for songs into the mix and watching them come to life in the capable hands of trained professionals. Well, imagine no more: Spontaneous Broadway is coming to town.
‘It’s a musical that is improvised every night in front of the audience,’ explained the exuberant and over-the-top Chad Bradley, the camp alter-ego of improvisation actor Geoff Paine (Neighbours, The Comedy Company, A Country Practice). ‘What they do is they come in with their ideas, write them down on little slips of paper, put them in a bucket we call The Bucket of Dreams.
‘Then we come out, say hello to the audience, pull the ideas out at random from the bucket and our favourites are ones we pitch as ideas, which we then turn into musicals. We improvise the song from the musical and we tell the audience what we think the musical should be. And then the audience gets to vote for their favourite idea and we do that musical on stage.’
If that sounds simple, it isn’t. Not for the actors anyway. It can, at times, be a skin-of-the-teeth ride into complete wrongness. After all, the entire show is completely improvised and made up on the spot, created under the competent musical direction of John Thorn. But as Bradley pointed out, sometimes disasters come with silver linings.
‘There are car crashes. There are disasters,’ Bradley explained with his slight New York twang. ‘But we’ve discovered that the audience doesn’t mind these. In fact they love them. They love seeing a fail. And we do. The whole thing is about bluffing, you see. We bluff. We’ll pour our hearts into the most mundane, banal things. That’s what is so exciting about it. The whole thing is completely absurd.’
Essentially, the whole show is one giant live jam session. ‘Really it’s a way of having fun with other people. If this happened with a band people would get it. What we’re doing is very similar, just with ideas and themes and plot.’
The overall effect varies according to what people put in. Examples of past song titles include such pearlers as Does my bum look big in this?, Get out of my Facebook and into MySpace, If you’ve got the gold mine I’ve got the shaft and How do you solve a problem like Korea?.
‘They don’t have to write down wacky clever ideas,’ Bradley concluded. ‘They can write down just whimsical little notions. They should also bring an open mind about what they are going to see and get ready to laugh, because it is a very, very funny show.’
Spontaneous Broadway opens Wednesday September 30 at His Majesty’s Theatre and runs until Saturday October 3. Tickets are available now. www.bocsticketing.com.au
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