Making Love with David Magidoff review – instant improv musical based on Fran Healy’s teenage infidelity
The US comic’s troupe tell the tale of a special guest’s romantic encounter, in this case Travis’s frontman – but their incoherence makes for a scatty if fun show
It’s a lovely format for improv: a special guest tells David Magidoff the story of some romantic (mis)adventure from their past, and Magidoff and pals turn it into an extemporised musical. Shades of Improbable theatre’s tender and funny Lifegame, many moons ago – although Making Love is more knockabout than that. Between musicians and improvisers, US actor and comedian Magidoff assembles no fewer than nine bodies on stage. It’s a lot, populating the stage with a surfeit of comic ideas, occasionally at the expense of the affaire du coeur that Travis frontman Fran Healy has offered up as raw material.
Magidoff is a Travis fanboy; he has Healy sing two songs, and gets starry-eyed about it, before the show proper begins. In conversation, the genial Healy then volunteers a droll story of teenage infidelity, a drunken tryst with a girl from another part of Glasgow, which he wrongly thinks will insulate him from discovery. The improvisers, led by Magidoff, then take over, goofing into being several scenes in which young Fran and his pal cop off with two Protestant schoolgirls, then must face the music when their misdemeanour is exposed.
The American cast make hay with the parochial detail of Healy’s story, and with the task of playing teenagers on heat. And mums on heat: Kimberly Condict steals the show as Mrs Healy, unable to stop kissing her son and his girlfriend on the lips. But she needs sharp elbows to claim that space. The show feels as competitive as it does collaborative, with different improvisers pitching in, in divergent comedy styles, and too little of the careful listening and generosity that good improv requires. The concept promises heart as well as laughter, but we mainly get chaotic comedy.
And that’s fine. It’s fun enough to watch Magidoff as Healy, and to watch Healy watching him, as young Fran sprints home to Glasgow, pursued by his guilty conscience (“You can’t run,” the company sings, “it’s gonna come get ya”) or to hear the Travis man’s cautionary tale hastily redrafted into poetry. If it’s a bumpy ride, improv-wise – well, since when did true love’s course run smoothly?
At Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, until 23 August