Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical (Stage 18, FOH PRO Stage)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“On January 18, 2024,” says a solemn announcer, “Grindstone Theatre improvised the perfect musical. Viewer discretion is advised.”

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Here’s the thing: they wrote it all down. As an experiment in musical theatre creation, Accidental Beach is a cheeky Fringe demo of something the Grindstone company does every week, with amazing dexterity, in The 11 O’Clock Number. They make up an entire musical on the spot — script, score, the works — based on audience cues.

We the people love the local. And Grindstone knows it. Jason Kinney’s Hot Boy Summer: The Musical, the musical satire created by the Grindstone team of Byron Martin and composer/songwriter/ musician Simon Abbott, was a bona fide homegrown hit.

I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the location of this unhinged new musical, Edmonton’s crazy, shifting riverside beach, was a cue, and the improvisers said Yes, because that’s what they do. And on the night of Jan. 18, they made it into a wildly freewheeling “libretto” about Accidental Beach where, hey, accidents happen.

The heroin needles and dead bodies add up, hot-rod SkiDoo dudes and junkies cruise the river, mobsters, assorted dope dealers, the macho workers of the Water Factory who turn toxic river sludge into a Saskatchewan elixir that’s better than booze. There’s a wholesome rom-com pair of musical theatre lifeguards, Sandy (Abby Vandenberghe) and Danny (Ethan Snowden), who don’t quite realize they’re in love. There’s Sandy’s dumbass boyfriend (Dallas Friesen).

And there are protracted developments involving boobs and boob size that have got to have been an unfortunate audience cue. Or else a throw-away improv line because tall slender Malachi Wilkins found himself in a wifely role. There’s … stop. WHY am I telling you the plot? I don’t even understand the plot. Just when you think the plot might be making sense (worrying: you’re cut off), it just stops doing that.

Anyhow, the point is that there’s an agile cast of four in Mhairi Berg’s production. And they are startling singer/dancers who commit, selflessly, to a lunatic assortment of roles, goofball props, and costume changes — and story developments or detours that would stump lesser beings. And the songs, accompanied and I guess instigated by fellow improviser Simon Abbott on the fateful night of the 18th, are amazingly constructed, with lyrics that rhyme. Even Saskatchewan River gets to be in a lyric (no kidding).

The songs, plus the bravado to pull them off, in a variety of styles from the jazzy to the bluesy to the musical theatre patter variety, are the real achievement of Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical. My favourite, I think, is a particularly lyrical summer number for two guys just zooming down the river, “just two friends on a SkiDoo, just two guys going for heroin….” Ah, the magic of an Edmonton summer. Abbott leads the onstage band from the keyboard, and he is an expert at making the spontaneous seem like a musical development the show has been waiting for.

The beach may be an accident, but the talent isn’t.