Sarah Jansen | Writer | Editor | Web Geek

It was a tired yet buzzed group that took the stage on the final night of the BrizImprovFest last night. The group was Twisted Melon performing their long form improvised show Blank: the Musical.

The cast of seven (sidekicked by a young pianist whose name I didn’t catch) asked the audience to call out things that a musical could be about, and the one they settled on was…

Lightswitch! The Musical

The team had obviously performed this format before and jumped right into an overture that was harmonised and everything.

It started off a bit slow with fairly frequent moments of awkwardness and to begin with it was a little too obviously formulaic.

But after a few minutes the Twisted Melons pulled it together and the random threads of the story began to be woven together with great skill and hilarity.

They used the lightswitch stimulus in so many gorgeous metaphors for the characters’ lives, with lyrics like ‘there’s a blackout in my heart’, ‘switch on my mind’, and the best rhyme I’ve heard in ages: ‘ambassador/capacitor’.

It was classic musical stuff: the people looking for love who find each other, the perfect couple that goes through a crisis, and the struggling young artist who finds his muse.

And of course, all this was made even better when offset by the less classic archetypes of the deformed baby born without a spine and the martini-shaking dog, Mittens.

(It was less disturbing live than it seems written down.)

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Stay tuned for more post-fest articles, interviews and deconstructions.