Spontaneous Broadway

Spontaneous Broadway is a full-length Broadway-style musical that is improvised to audience suggestions. In Act 1, the audience is welcomed into a ritzy, late ’40s nightspot for the urbane wit-erati. Theatergoers are encourage to think of themselves as an ersatz Algonquin Roundtable, and create titles for songs they’d like improvised into fruition. At intermission, the audience votes on which song they’d like to see back. In Act 2, that song inspires an actual musical-sewn together on the spot. The motif changes, of course, from the Coward-esque watering hole to whatever the plot calls for, using scenic elements the cast pulls together: backgrounds are pulled down like windowshades, costumes and props are pulled out of a trunk, and anything that’s not at-hand is readily simulated in the improvisation. Composer Ben Toth provides musical inspiration from the piano. The process tends to yield plays with a main plot and usually, one or two subplots, all of which
resolve together convincingly by the end of the story.