Arts and Culture

Baby Wants Candy, a completely improvised musical has returned to Adelaide Fringe.

The musical is host to a range of actors and alumni including Thomas Middleditch and Rachel Dratch.

Breakfast presenter Sam Smith decided to head along to to see if Baby Wants Candy deserved the hype.

Click here for tickets and more info.

Produced by Sam Smith

When you enter the Umbrella Revolution tent you’ll see there’s nothing flashy about this venue, which allows the audience to pay complete attention to the musicians and performers of Baby Wants Candy.

Don’t be fooled by the name, unless the audience asks for it there is no baby or candy in the musical, or at least not the one I saw.

Each night is a completely different show because the way this musical works is that the performers ask the audience to come up with a title and the audience then votes on the best one.

So the musical I saw was called Voldemort Gets A Nose Job.

What happened next blew my mind.

The actors didn’t go behind a curtain to discuss anything, instead two actors came up and began to thread a story about Harry Potter’s 5th year at Hogwarts and the raging jealousy Voldemort had over the boy who lived and his protruding nose.

There wasn’t a moment’s pause for the actors to discuss what to sing or who would play whom – which lead to a number of hilarious moments.

The music starts without warning and the actors are thrown into the challenge of making a comical and pleasant sounding song.

In this regard they were seamless, the words and tune flowed and somehow they all sang in chorus.

There were only two moments where they fumbled over each other and it was barely noticeable.

The only criticism I have is the lack of costuming, while this would be hard to improvise, maybe some sort of colour palette or uniform would make this group look as cohesive as they sound.

By the end of the night my cheeks were raw from laughing and I honestly would go along to another show because as the actors say, ‘Every night is a different show’.