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:
“My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The name of the town isn’t important. It’s the one that’s just twenty-eight minutes from the big city. Twenty-three if you catch the morning express. It’s on a river and it’s got houses and stores and churches. And a main street. Nothing fancy like Broadway or Market, just plain Broadway. Drug, dry good, shoes. Those horrible little chain stores that breed like rabbits.”
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993)