Ruth Bratt and company in An Improbable Musical. Picture: Marc Brenner
Innovative theatre company Improbable’s An Improbable Musical will follow its critically acclaimed premiere at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate earlier this year by embarking on a UK tour.
Featuring a cast of improv specialists who take to the stage to create a new musical every performance, the Royal & Derngate and Improbable production will open at the Exeter Northcott on 26 September 2022 before playing a limited London run at the Hackney Empire from 21 October. The tour will return in the spring with dates including the Gulbenkian Arts Centre in Cambridge from 13-16 April 2023.
Directed by the co-artistic director of Improbable, Lee Simpson who also performs in the production, the cast includes Josie Lawrence (Whose Line Is It Anyway; Good Omens, Amazon/BBC; The King and I, London Palladium), Ruth Bratt (Showstopper! The Improvised Musical), Niall Ashdown (Tristan and Yseult, Kneehigh), and puppet designer and director Aya Nakamura (All Wrapped Up, Oily Cart, Talking Rubbish, Theatre Rites) who also designs and directs puppetry in the production. Further casting is to be announced.
The musical devisor and director Christopher Ash (Showstopper! The Improvised Musical) also performs in the show alongside musicians Max Gittings on flute, Joley Cragg on percussion and Juliet Colyer on cello.
The creative team for the production also includes E Mallin Parry, associate director Angela Clerkin, lighting designer Colin Grenfell, sound designers Oscar Thompson and Will Thompson with movement direction by Pauline Mayers.
Describing the production, Simpson said: “Some of the best bits of any show the audiences never get to see – beautiful moments of discovery, fresh minted gags, a story coming alive for the first time – all of which happens in the rehearsal room. Less of a secret is that you never see the worst: dead ends, duff choices, bits that don’t fit. With this new production, we put it all on the stage: triumphs, disasters, the wonderful and the what-the-hell? How? By improvising from scratch a new show every night with story, song and puppetry conjured from the unlikeliest materials and every moment of creation (or lack of it) witnessed. This is not an attempt to improvise the “classic” musical but an unapologetic experiment in starting with nothing and seeing where the night ends.
“Improv is in rude health and there are some very successful make-it-up-as-you-go-along shows. Most often they take a genre we know and love and give us their improvised version. The best of these are brilliant. We love them. An Improbable Musical is a little bit different, because the frame for the show is not a genre, but what is in the theatre at that moment on that night, both the tangible: a skeletal tower of stairs, puppets, random materials and also the intangible: the impulses of the actors and musicians, the fantasies and dreams of the audience, the synchronicities and happy mistakes. The show sets out to listen and respond to all these. This is theatre made out of listening, and a bit more listening in the world is worth a try, right?”
Angela Thomas
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