Spontaneous Broadway is an advanced long-form improvised performance, usually based on audience suggestions. The audience typically submits titles of songs that have never been written, and the performers choose suggestions to create songs, the audience votes through acclamation on their favourite song, which is then used as the core of a brand new Broadway musical.
The format received a favorable review from The New York Times when it premiered in New York in 1995.
Though not required or necessarily encouraged by improv professionals, elements of humor inevitably surface in the performance because of the surprising and playful nature of improvisation and its use of typical Broadway stereotypes. The performers' songs are supported by an onstage musician or band that improvises the music, generally in the style of typical show tunes.
The format was created in New York City and has been performed by a number of different companies around the US.
The Spontaneous Broadway format was created by Kat Koppett in association with Freestyle Repertory Theatre in New York. Koppett is a 20-year improv veteran, having worked with Freestyle Repertory Theatre) and San Francisco's BATS Improv. She is currently a performer with and Training director for the Mop & Bucket Company, an improv troupe based in the Capital District of New York State. In 1995, TheaterWeek Magazine named Kat one of the year's "Unsung Heroes" for her creation of Spontaneous Broadway, which is now performed regularly by teams of actors all over the world.
On 6 April 2010, the show began its run at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in Australia. It went down very well with the audience in the Arts Centre's Fairfax Studio.
Read more about Spontaneous Broadway: Sources
Famous quotes containing the words spontaneous and/or broadway:
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)