Review: FLOP! AN IMPROVISED MUSICAL FIASCO at Great Canadian Theatre Company

The new musical that opened this week at the Great Canadian Theatre Company is a total FLOP! No, seriously. The show is called FLOP! An Improvised Musical Fiasco, the brainchild of Ron Pederson and Alan Kliffer. Presumably, we - the audience - have gathered for a performance of White Christmas but, at the last second, almost the entire cast and crew have come down with food poisoning (thanks to someone’s genius idea of serving a shrimp and milk cocktail), and the remaining trio must do something quick.

The three actors (Jan Caruana, Pederson, and Hannah Spear) ask audience members for a few words to evoke a general setting, like what era should they be in, in which country should it take place. Next, they ask the audience for a few words to provide them with something vague to work with (we ended up with things like the Victorian era, Paris, pearl brooch, and consumption). Then they literally just make it up as they go along.

I’ll preface this by saying that improv is a lot harder than it looks. The fact that the actors can keep a plot going, make up songs timed with the accompanying music, and even attempt some choreography to go along with it, is pretty impressive. Granted, the plot and the songs are silly, sometimes even nonsensical, but it’s a lot of fun to watch. The story that emerged on opening night, “La Mer de la Perle” was about a lovesick woman (Spear), who decides to join the convent at Notre Dame de Paris to serve Big Daddy God. There, she is subject to trials and tribulations (involving alligators) from the Mother Superior (Pederson), who just wants to get her grubby little hands on her victim's dowry, a cherished pearl brooch she received after her mother died of consumption. Finally, this statuesque, beautiful almost-nun-damsel-in-distress is rescued by Quasimodo (Caruana) and they fall in love. A multitude of other characters were also involved, requiring quick wig, beard, and problematic bow tie changes. A few times, the actors even had to swap characters to keep the dialogue flowing. Does it sound ridiculous? Maybe so, but it’s a helluva ride and I can think of much less entertaining ways to spend an evening.

Since the show is entirely improvised, there are no sets, no real costumes other than the aforementioned wigs, and only a few scattered props. The actors convey the settings through mime and movement, and it works really well for the most part. The beauty of it all is that every show will be entirely different, so you can attend sixteen different shows over the course of FLOP!’s run. Of course, if these were actual scripted shows, they would be utterly deserving of their FLOP! moniker, but the show is really about seeing how the improvised musical unfolds, rather than the quality of said musical.

With its lighthearted spontaneity, if you need a laugh this holiday season, thank Big Daddy God that you can head over to the Great Canadian Theatre Company and see whatever the FLOP! of the night is. 

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