Horsham: get your suggestions ready for Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

With your help, the team will create a fully realised musical on the spot, transforming suggestions for settings, genres, musical styles and even the name of the show into ingenious storylines with hilarious characters. From Pink Floyd to Stephen Sondheim, via a primary school, Ancient Egypt or a mattress shop, if the audience can suggest it, The Showstoppers will perform it.

Dylan Emery, co-artistic director with Adam Meggido, stresses it's a very theatrical show. It's absolutely not ‘Hey guys let's do some improv!’: “The audience enter the theatre and they see a writer of musicals at his desk. The telephone goes and it's the producer saying that there is an empty theatre and the writer needs to come up with a new musical in two hours. The writer puts the telephone down and turns to the audience and says ‘I'm going to need your help.’ So we will ask the audience where it's going to be set and maybe have a vote on that. We ask for musical styles and themes and also for a title and then the writer will give a short summary of what it's going to be and then the actors will come on and start improvising.

“I usually play the writer,” says Dylan, and clearly for the sake of the show it's important to take only suggestions that are actually going to go somewhere. For instance, Donald Trump's trial might be a joke for a few minutes but just wouldn't have the legs. Much better to be on The Titanic or in ancient Rome or somewhere inspiring, an epic setting that will give the performers somewhere to work with: “In that sense it's about rejigging audience expectations, the fact that we really are going to make a great musical. So you do manage the choices to an extent. You have to avoid bad taste or if you've got 15 minutes to go and someone shouts out ‘Alien invasion!’, you realise you haven't got time for that particular idea if you've been doing a play about a family funeral. But if someone shouts out that another will has been found then yes, you've got something to work with. You have to try to avoid stuff that might make a three-minute gag but certainly not a two-hour show. And also we prefer to be doing things that we haven't done a million times before. You think how many times the cast have been pirates but that's hardly the audience’s fault so I will say to the audience ‘So what is special about these pirates?’ just to be able to go somewhere new. We've done more than 1,200 shows and we just never stop!”

The company grew out of Shakespeare-based improvisation, “a way of exploring the huge range of work that goes into making Shakespeare interesting or great or sometimes terrible.”

From there Dylan introduced the notion of improvising songs and from there, he and Adam got together to explore the possibility of actually improvising a whole musical and that's how Showstopper! The Improvised Musical was born in 2008, going up to Edinburgh Fringe and doing very well: “And we have just kept going from there.”