Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Baby Wants Candy!
Baby Wants Candy!
Genre: Comedy, Improvised Theatre, Musical Theatre
Venue: Assembly
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
With a different improv musical every night, Baby Wants Candy! presents the opening (and closing) night of an almost-musical based on audience suggestions. Just incredible to watch.
Review
A different musical every night, completely improvised. The theme? Up to the audience. A wild premise, but one that works fantastically well in execution, especially with a cast and crew so talented. From watching, you’d hardly guess that everyone on stage, from the quartet of musicians to the six actors, are quite literally making it up as they go along.
Baby Wants Candy! is an American troupe of improv performers back again after eleven sell out Fringe runs, and by now, they’ve honed their skill down to a fine art, with a consistently good show that brings in audiences every year. Every night is opening (and closing) night in their musical run, and they’ll teach you the rules of their game quickly. Name a musical that doesn’t exist, and we’ll perform it for you. With a couple of recent examples to get the cogs turning (Finding Emo sounds like an absolute emotional rollercoaster), the night is left up to the whims of the audience, and, as in any semblance of democracy, you’re allowed to vote on the musical you’d rather see.
We were fortunate enough to get an absolute cracker of a show: “The Devil Wears Crocs.” Within a matter of moments, a fully sprung musical had formed, complete with emotional beats, musical motifs, and enough gags that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Our star cast quickly assumed their roles: Anna Bortnick as Anne Hathaway, leading lady determined to bring frumpiness back in style at Fashion Magazine Weekly, hoping to impress the steely-eyed gaze of Miranda Streep (Alyssa Davis). Lily Ludwig is Emily Blunt, Miranda’s first assistant who doesn’t believe in Hathaway’s croc-related dream, and Allen Lucas is Anne’s terrible boyfriend cum open window salesman who has conveniently found a lucrative business deal through her new job, given that so many twinks seem to be throwing themselves out of windows. And Austin Packard and Derek Demko were the Dr. Scholl brothers, with a history of shoemaking going back generations (they made shoes for knights originally, and they had a song to prove it).
The musicians likewise were excellent: improv is such a difficult skill to master, and Adrien, Kenny, Duncan, and Andrew are clearly ridiculously talented. Roaring power ballads seemed to come from nowhere, with a particularly fantastic standout of “Fashion is Pain” almost stealing the show. How they managed to create such great songs at a moment’s notice was mystifying. If I wasn’t a sceptic, I’d suggest telepathy.
The fact that this show was, in fact, improv, was almost too much to believe. With a tight-knit cast, the actors riffed off of each other seamlessly with just a moment’s notice, managing to add layers of hidden jokes and background skits to completely fill out the stage. Miranda Streep could be belting out a ballad to Anne Hathaway whilst everyone else descends into a playground game of musical chairs with rather higher stakes – you see, it’s now a board meeting, and the loser’s getting fired. You’ll have to see it to believe it. The quality is brilliant enough that it almost feels rehearsed, except it most certainly isn’t.
But this isn’t the show that you’ll see. After all, it entirely depends on the night, and whatever the audience decides to throw at them. One thing’s for sure, though, and that’s that you’ll see an incredible show with a cast at the top of their game.
