Skip to main content

Review of An Improbable Musical at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

If there is one thing we all need at the moment, it is a good dose of fun, and with Improbable’s An Improbable Musical, fun, comedy, and randomness are at its very heart. Over the course of roughly ninety minutes, this was a convoluted path through a story bred from just three ideas from the audience, and indeed a hefty amount of rehearsing. Yes, this is improv at its heart, but much like the great Morecambe and Wise looked off the cuff, there is a huge amount of rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing involved to get a fluidity such as this.

Our artists for the night were Janet Etuk, Niall Ashdown, Ruth Bratt and Adam Courting and perhaps the most familiar, Josie Lawrence. For the press evening of the run, sadly, the sixth performer Aya Nakamura was having to isolate. Musicians Max Gittings, Joley Cragg, Juliet Colyer and Christopher Ash as the musical director joined onstage with these performers.

An Improbable Musical took stimulus for its performance from the audience by asking just three simple questions. The first, a favourite place, which was selected to be “the lakes” and elaborated with the fact that it was “because it is full of water”, a sentiment that would provide much material on the evening, not least from Josie Lawrence. The second question was a word that delighted your mouth when you said it, and they chose this as “chocolate”. Finally, the audience were given the opportunity to give an opening line, and a star member of the audience provided “the house is on fire, and this time it isn’t my fault”.

From these embers of ideas, the musical developed, and not always how you would expect. For instance, Lawrence twisted the house burning line from its initial impact of humour to a poignant line in a song describing the breakdown of a marriage. Elsewhere, chocolate provided a rather brilliant scene involving the making of the sweet substance, brimming with humour, and then the undying love from every member of the group for Lawrence’s character. This comic scene involving mugs and teapots then cleverly segued into a beautiful and clever puppetry scene involving three ducks upon the lakes.

That was the perfect collection of use of the three ideas from the audience, and indeed it continued throughout the evening as the central story of a wife moving out and leaving her train loving husband opened and ended the evening, alongside several other brilliant scenes featuring often simple, but hilarious characters.

You could constantly see as each scene opened, they had come straight out of the rehearsal room, carefully prepared in a way that improv only can be. Key among the scenes was a contemporary dance scene which you felt sure was a box that needed to ticked for each performance, and as it continued, the audience might have been unsure what was going to happen and how it would work (and maybe the cast as well at first), but then, bang, Adam Courting brought it into reason. These were the commune members, already mentioned as neighbouring our couple’s house, and then, of course, their chant crashed back to be linked to the lakes.

It is amazing to see how it works, how the performers become so intuitive to each other, and indeed save one another when things don’t seem to go anywhere, as Ashdon did saving what appeared to be a startled hare Courting in the centre of the stage at one point. This is teamwork of the highest order, someone always has your back.

Part of that team also are the excellent musicians as well. Gittins, Cragg, Colyer and Ash just seemed to know when and where they are required, with the music beginning at what seemed just the perfect point every time. They also occasionally become even more part of the action as Gittings did very much at one particularly amusing point.

The set from E M Parry is a thing of simplicity in its requirements, just a staircase and a door and a revolve of the two levels, which provides the performers a playground beyond their usual domain of just the stage before it. Elsewhere on stage seems to be a collection of every prop you could imagine, ready for action, be it a suitcase or a top hat and feather boa.

The songs that were performed were a brilliant collection, and often disturbingly more memorable and catchy than some I have heard in “proper” musicals. I know for sure that Single, and Ready to Mingle, is likely to flash back now and again as an earworm, if nothing more than for the memory of how brilliantly and comically Ashdown performed it. Other memorable moments that will never be seen or heard again included cacao and the swan, both involving the brilliant Bratt.

So, there is my review of a show that you will never see, even if you purchase a ticket and head to the Royal & Derngate before Saturday to see An Improbable Musical, and that you should (and as my additional ticket now suggests, so am I). This is a rollicking evening of entertainment of which neither you, nor the performers, will know where the show is heading, until it finally gathers pace and rolls to its almost certain hilarious destination.

Clever, funny, random, a perfect evening of improv madness awaits you.

Performance reviewed: Tuesday 1st March 2022 at the Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton.
An Improbable Musical runs at Royal & Derngate until Saturday 5th March 2022.

For further details about the Royal & Derngate see their website at http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk

An Improbable Musical is A ROYAL & DERNGATE, NORTHAMPTON AND IMPROBABLE PRODUCTION

Production photos: Marc Brenner


Popular posts from this blog

Review of The Bodyguard at Milton Keynes Theatre

The 1992 film The Bodyguard , starring Kevin Costner and marking the acting debut of singing megastar Whitney Houston, was a standard romantic thriller, greatly enhanced by Houston's presence and a cascade of big musical numbers. Surprisingly, it took twenty years to make the transition to the stage. Premiering in London in December 2012, just ten months after Houston's death, the show has since become a massive global success. Now it arrives at Milton Keynes Theatre again as part of its fourth UK tour in just thirteen years. The Bodyguard sees former Secret Service agent turned bodyguard, Frank Farmer, hired to protect an Academy Award-nominated actress and music superstar, Rachel Marron, from a stalker. Between Farmer's duties and Marron's career, something inevitably builds between the two amid music and dancing aplenty. Taking the leads on this tour are Sidonie Smith as Rachel and Adam Garcia as Frank. Smith has appeared in The Bodyguard before, as a walk-in in a p...

Review of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Milton Keynes Theatre

There have been numerous productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's groundbreaking musical since it first appeared in 1968 and opened in the West End in 1973. One might wonder if there is still room for another tour. However, judging by the packed audience in Milton Keynes Theatre for the opening night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat , much interest remains for this show. Also, with this production first seen at The London Palladium in June 2019, and with a few production elements altered, Joseph still has, after all those years, the room to change and evolve. However, the question is, does this change help or hinder the show's history? For those unfamiliar with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it tells the story of Joseph, Jacob's favourite son, in a lighthearted and musical style that jumps between various genres. Joseph's brothers are somewhat envious of him, leading to them selling him into slavery to an Egyptian nobleman. As for ...

Review of Breaking the Code at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

Breaking The Code , the opening play in the new Made in Northampton season at Royal & Derngate, is a surprisingly old and rarely seen play. Written in 1986 by Hugh Whitemore, it tells the story of legendary codebreaker Alan Turing, a man who, in the 1980s, when this play first appeared, was relatively unknown. The years since the origin of this play have been good for Turing, with his life's work finally getting the recognition it deserves, and also, very much what this play centres on, a recognition of the horrific life and end that Turing had as a result of dealing with the laws of the day. Breaking the Code has seen life before on the stage of the Royal, as back in 2003, Philip Franks took to the role of Turing in a very well-received production. So, what of this brand new version directed by the Royal & Derngate's artistic director Jesse Jones? Does it live up to Turing's legend? That is an unquestionable yes with no machines needed to crack the class behind thi...