York Theatre Royal – Saturday 23rd April 2022
Review by Zoe Giles
5*****
To be honest I really didn’t think I would enjoy this show having: no script, no theme, no idea of songs etc. How wrong could I have been, we absolutely LOVED it. The evening starts with the audience shouting out ideas which are then voted on, and the loudest cheer is the main “Theme” for the evening with the other ideas fed in, our winner was a party hosted by Boris Johnson, with the addition of a bouncy castle and a holiday let in Matlock.
Next, we were asked to come up with a name for our play, the clear winner was “you’ve let us all downing street”
The final part of our improvised play was to which musicals we would like our play to be set, the audience came up with Jesus Christ Superstar, Rent, Annie get your Gun and Hamilton.
And, we were off on our adventure for the evening with the skills of these amazing improvisation actors who from the first moment had us in stitches and I knew we were in for a treat, there is no fancy set design just basic props set against a black background with red highlights and because the actors are so good, they didn’t need anything fancy to make us believe what they were doing we were so mesmerised by their performances nothing else was needed.
And so, we found ourselves at a “meeting” at Downing Street where cheese and wine were being served and the fun and games really started as they made up a script ,then a song to the suggested musicals, and time just raced by as the actors took on different roles and characters while feeding off each other and taking a lead from each other which was so impressive it was hard to believe that this was all being made up right before us. During the interval we were asked to tweet ideas for how the second act should begin and so we were treated to a march on downing street to the musical Les Misérables and with the sound of music a very close second, we were then treated to the
Vontrap children singing the Bing Bong song, which for me was the highlight of the evening you had to be there!
It’s no wonder they have been awarded an Oliver award and been invited back for a 13th year to the Edinburgh fringe festival, if you get the chance to see this show, I would strongly recommend you do I can’t obviously tell you what it will be about or the theme but what I can say is you’ll have a great time!!!!!