Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

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Given that each night throws up a completely different show with a brand new setting, plot, characters and music, it’s difficult to make any grand generalisations about Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. Nevertheless, even if you happen upon a night half as good as the one attended by this reviewer, you are in for a spectacular treat.

The musicality and comic talent of the Showstopper cast is truly incredible, a fact illustrated in their ability to work a series of bizarre, esoteric and disparate audience suggestions into a coherent whole that manages to be not only enjoyable, funny and musically very impressive, but also cleverly subversive. The director character is brilliantly, ironically pompous while the cast knowingly toy with the conventions of the genre, giving Showstopper a pleasingly postmodern air.

That the product of tonight’s ingenious improvisation is a show of arguably equal merit to many fully-fledged musical theatre productions—certainly in terms of plot-development and characterisation—either speaks wonders for the incredible talent of this cast or is a damning indictment of the genre itself. Either way, even those coming from the school of thought that is naturally sceptical of the artistic merit of musical theatre will come away from this thoroughly satisfied.

Simply put, this is brilliant, brilliant fun.