Baby Wants Candy The Improvised Musical with Full Band
nytheatre.com review by Micah Bucey
August 20, 2009
Stop. Don't read this review. Really, there's just no reason. You'd have a lot more fun running over to Crosby Street and buying your ticket to BABY WANTS CANDY, a madcap, musical romp currently improvising the heck out of audience-suggested, non-existent musical titles and stretching the limits of taste, art, and your lung capacity for a full hour. Seriously. You will not be able to breathe. You will laugh yourself sick. You will beat the person sitting next to you, certain that you just heard the most brilliant private joke and that they must have missed it.
BABY LOVES CANDY: The Completely Improvised Full Band Musical starts with four musicians and six actors onstage with no story or score and ends with an entire tune-filled extravaganza with a cast of dozens. To try to outline this theatrical confection any more would make no sense. The point is: The show is created JUST FOR YOU, right before your eyes. If I sound like a shilling fanboy with decreasing credibility, it's just because the smile that pinned itself to my face last night at 7pm still hasn't left my mouth. The cast, the band, the show are JUST THAT GOOD.
Are there jokes that fall flat? Sure. But these six pros are so expertly enraptured by the possibilities of improvisation and musical storytelling that they are able to spin the most awkward, unsuccessful moments into pure comic gold. At my performance, the title was A SCOTSMAN IN THAILAND. If this title doesn't immediately make you laugh out loud, have no fear. The story created from this suggestive but oddly chaste title defied its simplicity, conjuring songs and scenes featuring under-aged prostitutes, mole-covered Scottish matriarchs, and even homosexual backpacks. That's right. Homosexual Backpacks. I'd tell you to wait and see, but the brilliance of this awesome exercise is that the show I saw last night will never exist again. The show you see when you go (AND YOU WILL GO) will be completely new and improvised on the spot.
Did you make it this far? Why are you still listening to me? All I'm going to do now is say that I wish the program specified exactly which ensemble members I saw last night so that I could list their names here ten times each. And now I have nothing more to add. Really.
I'm sorry. I just can't contain myself. GO.
