By Dave
Available until: This show will be available until 2nd April. There is another live, improvised Showstopper show today (27th March) at 7.30pm and another on 24th April. (If you book the 24th April show now you’ll be entered into a prize draw to have a song improvised for you live on air.)
The Showstoppers are a group of musical theatre performers who improvise shows live in response to suggestions from the audience. Usually it’s in a theatre but it all works very well online too. This is the eighth online show which has been watched and reviewed by the Mobile Theatre team.
Although the format is always the same, the stories and songs are always different and the Showstoppers can be any four from a group of sixteen. We have seen eleven of them – Jonathan Ainscough, Ruth Bratt, Justin Brett, Pippa Evans, Susan Harrison, Joshua C. Jackson, Ali James, Adam Meggido, Philip Pellew, Andrew Pugsley and Lucy Trodd. A twelfth, Dylan Emery, has hosted a few shows. There’s another show tomorrow night (or tonight by the time you read this) so fingers crossed we’ll have at least one more to add to our collection.
Not that we’re getting bored with the ones we know! It’s always great to see them. It feels like we haven’t seen Philip Pellew for ages and he’s always brilliant and we’ve only seen Justin Brett once, months ago so it’s great to see him back. We were hoping for a Pippa Evans show after watching her interview on Fane Online (yes, we do make time to watch other types of online show!) and Ali James is always great. We saw her in a few interval features so we were very excited to see her making her online Showstopper debut and she’s always welcome back on our screens.
In addition to the four performers, Andrew Pugsley hosted the show and provided the Showstoppers with some great challenges, ably assisted by Susan Harrison in chat (she’s another one we’d like to see again, we haven’t seen Susan since our very first online show. For that matter ,while we know Andrew well as a host, I think we’ve only seen him perform once). Showstoppers, I have good news for you. We’ll be happy whoever is performing.
I think we might also have had a new band tonight – Chris Ash on keys and Craig Apps on percussion. As Pippa pointed out in her show, the musicians also have to improvise and they actually start off a lot of the songs, setting the style and the speed, not to mention the key. Great work from these guys.
At the start the Showstoppers were given four plots to choose from. They made a great choice (even though I did have to google to find out what it is – I don’t think they were around when I was young, though it’s the kind of thing I’d totally have been into fifteen years ago when I had even less sense) and they were able to bring in elements of one of the other story ideas into the musical too.
The musical is about four young Americans – cheerleader Cindy, smart Wendy, geeky Eric, and Tony… well there are a few secrets where Tony is concerned. The Showstoppers improvised some great relationships between the characters. As well as the usual romance, there were some very interesting sibling relationships and a rivalry between Cindy and Wendy which was fun. Other characters appear throughout the musical too, all played by the Showstoppers.
The audience post plot and music ideas in chat which I’m assuming Susan relays to Andrew. Plot ideas include a scene in a different language (I wouldn’t say our Showstoppers are fluent but at least we know they’re human, they definitely do seem superhuman at times) and a theme on the subject of secrets. The music ideas are songs in the style of a particular composer or musical and there were some great and very varied choices tonight.
The plot went in a supernatural direction so there were songs in the style of a few creepy musicals. One in the style of a Stephen Sondheim musical which was started off by Pippa was especially impressive. I think it’s clever to sing in harmony at all but improvising in harmony? Superhuman. Definitely.
After the interval the Showstoppers had to choose a title for their musical, based on four suggestions from the audience. I think they made the best choice though it would have been quite fun to bring goats into the story. There have been quite a lot of ducks so let’s expand the farmyard.
The second half has some more spooky songs but if anyone’s thinking these musicals are just fun, there’s a bit more to it than that. The four Showstoppers aren’t just musically talented – they’re also great actors and they come up with some really big emotional moments in every show. There are big moments for all the characters. Philip charts Tony’s emotional journey brilliantly, Ali makes Cindy into a bit more than the stereotypical cheerleader, Justin’s Eric also has a few things to learn about himself while Pippa’s Wendy tries to find the confidence to speak out.
Another really enjoyable show from the Showstoppers. Looking
forward to the next one… and there’s not long to wait!
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