Like tightrope walking over the Niagara Falls, Baby Wants Candy is an ambitious concept: either it works or it ends up six miles downstream. Tonight, the cast are heroes. Tomorrow, they could be dredged from the drink. That’s how it goes when you’re improvising for your life.Stick seven actors and five musicians on a stage. Get the audience to suggest a theme. Take that theme and form a one-off improvised musical out of it. Songs; dialogue; dancing - all the trappings of a rip-roaring musical, but improv’d rather than scripted. Previous efforts from the group have included Disney Princess Whorehouse The Musical! and The Day That Gingers Rule The World The Musical! What shall tonight’s theme be? ‘Amish Girls Gone Wrong!’ shouts someone near the front. Amish Girls Gone Wrong The Musical! it is. The exclamation mark is entirely justified.How improvised is improvised, incidentally? Do the cast have a safety net beneath their tightrope, a series of fall-back routines so that if they trip and stumble there’s still hope of salvation? Is it really a spur-of-the-moment suggestion from an audience member in-no-way-affiliated-with-the-cast, or is it like 8 out of 10 Cats, where the comedians get to prepare their ‘spontaneous’ material in advance? And why do reviewers always have to be so cynical? It doesn’t matter; there’s no time for questions - the show’s already started.The action kicks off on the Amish farm where our chaste cast are struggling to contain their suppressed urges. Thankfully, they fail miserably. One moment they’re churning butter; the next they’re turning tricks in a grimy strip club. When Amish girls go wrong, they go really wrong.The cast, who are as disciplined as Shaolin monks, omnisciently assume their roles, harmonising over their colleagues, finishing one another’s couplets and simulating sinful acts in each other’s faces. The results are so engaging that you soon become immersed in the story and forget that you’re watching a bunch of talented actors cobbling lines together on the spot. Very few of them are fluffed.Had the first shout from the audience been ‘Virtualisation and Cloud Computing!’, perhaps our evening wouldn’t have been so much fun. We’ll never know. All that can be said for certain is that tonight was the first and last performance of Amish Girls Gone Wrong The Musical! It also happened to be the best. Baby Wants Candy is brilliant. Baby can have whatever the hell she likes. Baby wants five stars? Baby’s got ‘em.
