It wouldn’t be a Brisbane Comedy Festival without Brisbane’s premier improvised comedy company ImproMafia.
Since forming in 2004, the company has delighted Brisbane's audiences with their performances of spontaneous hilarity. After selling out their 2017 show ‘Potter Unplotted’, they return to provide their own twist on another beloved childhood franchise in ‘Animated! An Improvised Musical Fairytale’.
“Yeah, we’re going to get sued by Disney,” cast member Tom Dunstan jokes.
‘Animated!’ will see improvisers create a new show every night of their festival run, taking inspiration from such Disney classics as ‘Aladdin’, ‘Snow White And The Seven Dwarves’, and ‘The Little Mermaid’.
“It’s more in that classic vein of telling a story and furthering the plot with songs in there. We get to enjoy a more stylised version of storytelling. And we’ll have nice big characters.”
Tom has been performing improv for much of his life, featuring in the cast of a number of ImproMafia shows. He explains there’s a lot to consider in a show parodying a particular genre, as he has done in the English murder-mystery themed show ‘Murder Village’.
“Like with any genre piece you need to understand the genre fairly well, what makes up the genre, whether it’s characters or plot points. When you’re performing you’re informed on how things fit in that world, and whether or not it subverts that world. Sometimes it’ll be, ‘how does this weird thing that doesn’t fit in the world fit in?’ Or, ‘this thing fits way too easily, how can we make it look weird in that world?’ There are points where you want to stay true to a genre when you’re improvising just so the audience have that satisfaction of seeing that genre, but at the same time you want to throw lots of surprises in that makes you think more about the tropes of the genre by subverting it. There’s joy in both ways. I think the bottom line is whichever choice you make, you do it lovingly to the genre, not as an assassination attempt.”
While ‘Animated!’ is based on popular children’s animated films, the show is neither animated nor suitable for children, allowing for beloved fairy tale characters to grow up and be put through more risqué scenarios. It’s something that suits Tom just fine, having been known to take on very challenging scenes.
“In a show in Sydney I invented a game called ‘The Nude Scene’, where I was naked on stage, but the goal of the game was for everyone else to keep my junk covered and stop me from exposing myself. The first few rows were in deep panic every time something changed. You know how sometimes people have dreams about being naked in front of lots of people or being in a play and not knowing the lines? This was both at the same time,” he laughs.
The cast have a large filmography of animated classics to take inspiration from, and will take on many audience favourites. However, Tom’s memories of the films will be fresher for a very good reason.
“I’ve got kids, so I’ve seen them all over and over again. They’re kind of burnt into my brain,” he laughs.
