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.
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.
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.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Performance reviewed: Tuesday 1st March 2022 at the Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton.
