Most would agree that some of the best parts of comedy are when a stand-up has an impromptu chat with an audience member, or when comic actors bounce off each other and improvise a scene.
Whose Line is it Anyway? therefore, offers the best of comedy, with a whole show of improvised acts and audience participation.
A huge hit of a TV show in the UK between 1988 and 1999, it’s still going in the US, and for two weeks only it has returned to the UK with a run at the Adelphi Theatre on The Strand.
We caught a show this weekend, and we’re telling you now: get your tickets quickly before it ends – it’s one of the funniest shows we’ve seen in a long time.
Familiar faces from the UK and US shows, Colin Mochrie, Josie Lawrence, Greg Proops and Brad Sherwood ensured big laughs – heck even UK host Clive Anderson got the audience going thanks to a nostalgic eye roll or 10 for his ‘900 points each’ jokes.
With a game show format, Clive sets the comedians tasks, often asking the audience for suggested themes. And then hilarity ensues: from a love song about a spade (or is it a shovel?), to a woman giving birth in the style of Bollywood, then an opera, then a Western, to standing, sitting, bending – where each actor has to be in one of those positions at all times.
Audience members are called up to provide sound effects, move the actors around (often putting them in rather intimate embraces) and to offer the contents of their handbags as props.
After just the first act, I had tears in my eyes and my cheeks hurt from laughing so much. By the end the audience was in rapturous applause and gave the team a standing ovation.
Bring Whose Line is it Anyway? back to TV and back into our lives we say: comedy is comparatively dull without it.
Until Sunday 5th July
The Adelphi Theatre
Box Office: 020 3725 7060
www.adelphitheatre.co.uk
www.ticketmaster.co.uk
