They open the show with a pretty standard format: asking for suggestions for a new musical. But the audience is a warmed up Saturday night crowd who know the score and are shouting out suggestions before the MC has a chance to finish his sentence.
The rowdy audience is quick to note that innuendo-fuelled suggestions get passed over, although they do finally settle on ‘Not So Nude on the Moon’, to be partially set in a mosque, and with the song ‘That’s What she Said’ thrown in somewhere along the way. I hear my neighbour – newly acquainted to the medium of improv musicals - exclaim ‘What? How they gonna do….??’, before we’re off into the first scene.

We open in a mosque with Jason Peterman (Quinn Beswick) and a tagline song ‘Always be respectful’, shortly followed by a scene with two astronauts. The audience were rolling in the aisles as the game of the scene emerged with each actor only allowing himself to speak once he had created a an increasingly over the top series of beeps from his navigation equipment.

Before long Peterman is courted’ by the Goa-n space programme to find out how a shadow of a naked man has appeared on the moon. Cue a moment between Crystal and Betsy, two girls abandoned on the moon by their parents who long to meet a man and have made a man-shaped shadow to draw men to them.

Improv is a risky business and the mention of ‘axis of evil’ meets with uncertain and disapproving noises from the audience, but the team push on and the rest of the show is the journey towards Jason and his rival astronauts finally meeting the two moon-girls , with visits from a spirit guide and various peripheral characters providing excellent support to the leads. The show ends with Peterman deciding to live on the moon with the women for the rest of his days.

Today things weren’t always clearly defined, which meant that some scenes lost the specificity that can provoke even more laughter and audience connection – disappointing, especially as I had seen this group do amazing things a few days earlier. Similarly, the songs, although well-put together and in most cases beautifully sung – often ended up as ballads, which showed off voices and rhymes but didn’t provide a wider range of genres that I was hoping to hear. Of course, the nature of improv means that tomorrow could well bring everything from Sondheim to Rock Opera and the reason today’s didn’t could well be due group’s knowledge and connection with the subjects picked, but I still feel there was a lost chance to live a little more dangerously than they did.

With that said, this is still a great and well-crafted musical with a creative use of space and some great one-liners. All the audience, gave a standing ovation at the end of the show and you could see throughout that the actors were alert to every offer. Where a ball was dropped, in most cases, it was picked up or at least alluded to at a later time and that’s what I really like about this group – if they make a mistake, if a name is forgotten or a piece of general knowledge is not forthcoming, they acknowledge and use it to their advantage. That’s what improv is all about, but One Night Stand do it with ease and style and that’s what makes them so funny and engaging to watch.