Brighton Fringe review by Steve Bennett

Showstoppers! brought musical improv to the West End… while Notflix only serves to show how wide the gulf between rank-and-file improvisers and their starry cousins really is.

This six-woman team, backed by a male pianist, create a full-length musical loosely based on the plot of the last film someone in the audience watched. I say ‘loosely’… this one was based on Eddie The Eagle, yet never featured a single ski-jump. Winter sports was enough of a premise.

The Waiting For The Call team stick pretty closely to the long-form improv formula called the Harold – which means they pair up for three separate storylines, run in rotation but which come together in the middle and the end. And in this case, the second visit to each pair involved a bit of a flashback; making the structure even more apparent.

In this case, the three strands were a confident Norwegian tutoring her more timid niece, a confident win-at-all-costs psychopath tutoring her more timid charge, and a confident British girl tutoring her more timid friend. You may have noticed a trend here.

The team have a drama-school confidence, performing big to cover any cracks in inspiration, plot or humour. But that only goes so far, and the story still clunked along awkwardly, kept alive by the sextet’s enthusiasm and persistence, but little else.

As in so many improv shows, the wit extended to cartoonish characters and the laughs when they slipped up, rather than anything deeper – or indeed any jokes. Musically, too, it was pretty straightforward, and they didn’t make things too challenging for themselves. Driven by the familiar, catchy rhythms of musical theatre numbers, there was probably only one rhyming lyric in the whole show when the demonically demanding tutor responded to ‘I quit’ with ‘you twit’, which was more inspired than it seems written down…

Putting out an hour’s improv – and musical improv at that – which doesn’t grind to a halt is undeniably a difficult skill to master. But if you look beyond that into whether the Notflix product is entertaining for the audience, and not just a theatrical exercise to stretch the performers, and it falls a little short.

The alleged warm-up deserves mention too, as musical comedian Katie Pritchard’s lack of confidence and utterances such as ‘I don’t really know why I’m here’ did nothing instil faith in the night, which was surely the very point of having her there…

Review date: 16 May 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett