It’s the most wonderful time of the year — family, friends and perhaps a musical fiasco? The Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) is performing FLOP! An Improvised Musical Fiasco from Dec. 10–22 and it promises to be nothing like you’ve ever seen before.
“They’re actually going to be making up to 16 musicals while we’re in Ottawa, if you can believe it,” says producer and director of the show Alan Kliffer about the cast’s performance.
You heard that right. This improvised show will be concocting a new musical every night on the spot. No sheet music, no script and no choreographer.
“The reason we call it a musical improv fiasco is because that’s kind of what it is,” says Kliffer. “It’s the performers working with each other and working based off the audience suggestions to create this fully realized musical on the spot — we have costumes and wigs to help make the show more realized, and in the course of an evening, you’ll see the opening and closing of a show.”
However, this idea has been in the works for over 10 years, with its first iteration in Toronto, shifting between a one or two act musical. It was very well received by the audiences they played to, inspiring Kliffer and the team to continue working on it, hosting pop up shows once every two months.
Jan Caruana & Ron Pederson in FLOP! An Improvised Musical Fiasco. Photo provided.
“I think that the whole idea spawned from just loving improv and loving Broadway musicals so much,” says Kliffer.
Eventually, these pop up shows led to full runs in Toronto and New York, finding an opportunity to workshop an iteration of it in Edmonton at the Rapid Fire Theatre. GCTC’s artistic director Sarah Kitz saw it in Edmonton back in 2023, which is what brought this version of the show to the GCTC stage.
“There were six cast members in these incarnations before, and Edmonton’s Rapid Fire Theatre helped us develop a show with two or three,” says Kliffer.
With all of the work that has gone into making FLOP! what it is today, how does the team prepare for a show that’s brand new, every single night? Kliffer says it’s actually a lot of drills and rehearsing structures.
“We’ll improvise scenes into songs together, I’ll shout out suggestions and then rehearse scenes into songs,” he says. “We’ll talk about structures, we’ll watch various examples of ‘I Want’ songs or patter songs or things like that, so we’re all speaking the same language that’s the same when we’re on stage together improvising.”
Kliffer says that the most difficult part of a show like this is rehearsing without an audience.
Jan Caruana & Ron Pederson in FLOP! An Improvised Musical Fiasco. Photo provided.
“It’s hard to run a full show without an audience because the show is so extremely audience dependent that we rarely do full runs of shows without an audience,” he says. “We’ll just be strengthening our improvisor’s toolbox together.”
As the show’s director, Kliffer says that it’s equally as tough as performing every night. He says that his job is really about keeping the integrity of the show, and making sure the cast is working together well.
“I think you really have to understand the craft of improvisation to be able to direct it,” he says. “A note that I give a lot to improvisers I find is look and listen, which is, make sure you’re looking at each other, making sure you’re really listening to each other and honing in.”
Kliffer’s hope is that audiences experience something new at the theatre that they might not have considered in the past.
“I’m just hoping that they fall in love with the idea of improv and that people learn to see theatre in a bit of a different way,” he says. “And also just to see the endless possibilities of what can be done — I think that’s what I most look forward to.”
Make sure to catch FLOP! An Improvised Musical Fiasco at the Great Canadian Theatre Company from Dec. 10–22. You can get your tickets online, with reduced capacity performances on Dec. 13 and 17, 1975 Pricing on Dec. 15 and a relaxed performance on Dec. 17. For more information about the show, visit the GCTC’s website.
