A Fringe institution at this point, Baby Wants Candy returns for another year of hijinks. Offering a different show everyday, Baby Wants Candy’s unique performance has more repeat visitors in their audience than I’ve seen yet.
For the uninitiated, the show is completely improvised, based off of a musical title someone in the audience makes up. They take a few suggestions from the crowd which scale from clever to… ‘Deadpoop’ (funnily enough, not many votes were cast in favour of that one). For our performance, the crowd voted for ‘Seagull Civil War’. This should give you a taste of the range of shows Baby Wants Candy produces.
The end result is very impressive. Improv is something I can’t wrap my head around. How do you come up with line after line of song perfectly rhyming on the spot? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
The quality of the show seems impossibly high. It is entertaining, comedic, and actually quite well sung. Something random I enjoyed about the show overall was when you could see the cogs turning in the heads of one of the actors, as they decided how they were going to change the scene or make a musical number happen and covertly communicated to the others when to participate.
If you weren’t paying attention, you would think the cast simultaneously has the same ideas, but actually the production is just a very well-oiled machine. I definitely think this is required Fringe viewing, which can only be grasped properly by seeing it live. Just remember to go with your best suggestions if you want to see something really off-the-wall.
Baby Wants Candy, Assembly George Square Studios, 20:00, until August 25.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/baby-wants-candy
Latharna Imlah
