REVIEW: The Big Sing 2025- Musical Improv Festival Day 3
The extended review of all three shows was getting too unwieldy, so I am breaking this mega review of the Big Sing 2025 into 3 parts, sorted by day.
Reviews of Day One Are Here.
Reviews of Day Two Are Here.
You are reading Reviews of Day Three.
This was the schedule:
THE BIG SING- DAY THREE
ACT ONE: THE MUSICAL ALLFORM SHOWCASE
The first show was, as it has been both previous nights, a showcase of one of the workshops. This one was called AllForms. Taught by Deana Criess and Mike Descoteaux, a husband and wife team of improvisors from Boston.
Both Deana and Mike were instrumental leaders in the now shuttered Improv Boston group. Deanna now works at the Perkins School For the Blind and teaches improv as a consultant. Mike, who now apparently works as pilot for Jetblue (so says Linkedin), founded the music program for Second City in Chicago and was the founder and director of a Chicago sketch satire called The Best Church of God. He was the accompanist for the showcase.
Deanna Cresser & Mike Descoteaux
The idea of AllForms seems to be to take all the various forms of musical improv (games, audience suggestions, short form, long form, and competition) and combine them together. At the showcase they did not get much into the pedagogy of improv, but I definitely detected traces of all of those forms together. Would love to have learned more about the philosophy of AllForms.
As before, the players had only met a couple of days before, and they did a great job of taking the ball and running with it in the improvised showcase.
One of the methods of creation was to take the initials of one of the audience members, and then solicit Broadway musical proposals from there, and then improvise the title of the song. Here’s a sample of that process.
An issue for any ensemble of performers is that there a couple of people who end up taking a bigger chunk of the stage time, and figuring out how to give everyone their due. In this showcase of 10, there were 3-4 people who kept on jumping in, and others who hung back. One of the best moments of the night though was one of the hangers back stepped forward and did a song about getting older. It happened naturally and organically and she stepped into the challenge quite well. I didn’t catch the beginning of her fantastic riff on getting older, but I did catch the end of it. You can also hear one of the other aspects of allforms– that someone can ring a bell and change something about the scene at any time. (this time it was sound effects). While I like the idea of this change, It happened FAR too often for my taste, making it more about the person changing the scene, than the scene itself.
ACT TWO: THE FALLEN SUNDAYS
The Fallen Sundays are the resident musical theatre improv group of Improv Comedy Copenhagen, a hub for Improv comedy in Denmark. They have performed previously at The Big Sing.
This year, they created an improvised musical based on a title from the audience. The title was provocative. Dear Valued Customer. It turned out to be a musical about a woman who was a banker who wanted to get a job in a supermarket as a cashier, despite her parental pressures (her mom wants her to take over the family bank, but does a total about face when she realizes that grandchildren might be possible.
I thought each of the individual actors of the show brought their own unique and interesting (if sometimes quirky) charms to the show, and they blended quite well together. It was clear that they had been working together for a while, and knew each other’s shtick. They also brought a pianist and a violinist in as accompanists, and having two people to play off (and a very different sound) gave an extra polish to the music.
ACT THREE:NIGHTWINGZ AN IMPROVISED LIGHTS OUT MUSICAL
The last show of the MainStage festival was a special performance by some of the teachers and some invited guests. It was spearheaded by Deana Criess, and it was a lights out audio show. They raised the lights and asked for a location that contained lots of locations, which they got a great suggestion: Amusement Park.
They then turned out the lights and the improvisers began to do their magic. The show was great ,with the beautiful voices, and quick comic stylings of the performers, all of whom were seasoned pros. From a weird amusement park called DonaldLand, named for a sick child who may or may not be dead, and one of the workers who has worked there for 50+ years, in a bizarre costume of Cinderella that keeps growing heads (including that of Winnie the Pooh and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) In short, the show was delightfully weird.
It ran about 45 minutes, and while most of it was pretty great, it could have been maybe 5 minutes shorter- it had a couple of false endings as well. Which is to be expected from actors who have never worked together.
I love the idea of the blackout show, and am dreaming up some interesting ideas to create a blackout clown show.
THE LATE SHOW: ASTIROIDS
The last show of the Festival was back at the BIG studios, and it featured a rap improv group from Amsterdam called Astiroids.They were a troupe of 8 (9 if you count their DJ) and they played rap improv games, did a competitive game where you had to get the audience to guess what your rhyme was or you were out.
(Ie, Jack and Jill went up a ____, there he took a little blue ____, Found a pie on a window _____, Got a knife and starting yelling _____).
Somebody went out because they couldn’t get the audience to realize that here cereal was made of BRAN. (It was actually the person who ended up winning the rap battle!)
The rap battle contest was the last event of the night, and the audience shouted out celebrities, and the singers had to dis-track them. In the end, Barbie beat out Genghis Khan.
This was a fun show with a lot of energy, and it was impressive because most of the rappers seemed that English was not their first language, but they were still killing it. I have to admit the studio was a little hot with all the people in it. I was glad to get a moment to get a little cool air.
Here’s something from the Rap Battle.
So that concludes 3 days of shows and reviews. I reviewed 12 shows, and am both happy and a little tired! Having opinions is easy, but writing them down is hard!