Theatre - Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

Who/what/where: Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, The Udderbelly Festival

This is a hard article to write, simply because Showstopper! manages to fit an awful lot in and should never give you the same performance twice. I've seen them perform once before, several years ago, and the experience then was both similar in style and completely different to the one I saw most recently.

The Udderbelly is an interesting venue as it's basically little more than a tent shaped like an upside-down purple cow, but is also one of the places in London to see fringe-style shows. The guys and girls from Showstopper have been a staple there for some time, and from both the times I have seen them they're well-worth catching.

The advantage of the show always being different is that I can get away with quoting spoilers, safe in the knowledge that it won't impact future performances unless there's some really odd similarities in the audience suggestions.

The introduction is a fairly straightforward formula, a man is on the phone talking about how well one of his musicals went, and is asked about the next one. At this stage audience suggestions are taken as to the setting and other, similar shows he can suggest. Along the way there are a few nice little theatrical nods (I suspect more so in some than others depending on the suggestions), so in this case we ended up set within Poundland, with references to Avenue Q, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Phantom, etc.
In addition there are moments where they appear to go out of the way to make things awkward for the rest of the cast on stage, expand out the plot/pad scenes, or otherwise mix things up a little, be it describing a character as incredibly posh and difficult to understand, the landmarks around London that the characters pass, or requiring Simon Cowell who was, for some reason, still in the scene, to rap his way off the stage.

I am sure there's a number of basic plot-schemes they follow (there are only so many basic stories in the world after all) but it's how you work with it that makes it interesting.

This time around, in the flagship Poundland store, the founder of Poundland and manager of the store is approached by Harrods to come and run their store. Leaving Poundland she leaves them to fend for themselves, and to cope with their surprisingly high volume of shoplifters while she sets about making everything a pound. Along the way we see the wonders of Harrods, oompa-loompas, people acting as puppets as part of an Avenue Q homage, and a man learning to love himself so that he might speak more confidently.

Eventually Harrods is suffering from selling their products at a pound, while Poundland is losing stock to shoplifters, deliveries aren't coming, and the place is in tatters. It is then revealed that this has all been part of a plot by the alien Simon Cowell to destroy the British economy. Discovering his one weakness is catchphrases from other shows they manage to defeat him and set about restoring order thanks to the radical idea of charging for things what they're worth.

It's an odd plot to describe, but I fully blame our audience for contributing several of the suggestions (such as "Simon Cowell is an alien" from one of the rows) and the main entertainment factor is in watching them take the ideas and run with them, turning them into a single (mostly) coherent plot, with several nice moments built-in.

They're on at the Udderbelly pretty much every Sunday, so if you're in the vicinity it's well-worth popping by.