Edinburgh on Thames

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece of comedy. A theatre producer on stage telephones Cameron Mackintosh and pitches him a new musical. Mackintosh answers and the producer invites ideas from the audience. ‘What’s the setting?’ Someone yelled ‘Late-night sauna’ at the performance I saw. The producer, without missing a beat, told Mackintosh that the show would be called, Sweat, Sweat, Sweat. If that was improvised it was world-class. The show develops along the lines suggested by the crowd and a number of hit musicals are parodied.

The audience, I suspect, enjoyed this more than me. The character of the producer faded away and his improvisational panache was forfeited. The sets and the costumes on stage appear rather drab and perfunctory because they have to be adaptable to any number of cues from the audience. The visual palette is dominated by red and black and the show looks as if it hasn’t quite left the rehearsal room.