Consistently Achieving the Impossible, with Daily, Fully Improvised Musical Comedy
This one will please both my British and American subscribers. Want to read about one of the most popular shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, year after year? Meet Baby Wants Candy.
American enthusiasm is their tankful of rocket fuel. And what they achieve each August, in Edinburgh’s rare month in the sun, is nothing short of incredible.
Baby Wants Candy is one of the world’s most celebrated comedy ensembles, performing all-new, fully improvised musicals, daily throughout the Edinburgh Fringe; they’ve been a festival favourite for many years, selling out every gig from 2015-present.1
Plus! They’re bringing two different shows. The troupe will split its time between what I hesitate to call “the main show” and Shamilton!, a fully improvised historical rap musical based on Hamilton. Those sparky cats are going to be knackered by the end of it...
Somehow, I managed to corner Adrien Pellerin (Musical Director), Anna Bortnick, and Chris Grace before the big month, and we squeezed out an interview that will one day be inscribed in stone.
The Interview
How similar are your life experiences?
*Chris laughed*
Anna: An incredible first question.
Me: Thank you.
Chris: I’m just imagining how Adrien would make a great band leader on a talk show.
Adrien: Oh! I would love that!
Chris: …But to answer your question, we all have different paths and skillsets.
How did you all get into comedy?
Anna: I entered comedy through acting. I studied theatre in school and performed in many shows, but it was comedy I loved the most, so I did improv on the side.
“Baby Wants Candy and Shamilton! combine my love of heightened theatricality, quick jokes, thinking on my feet and collaborating with friends.”
- Anna Bortnick
Adrien: I became a musical theatre kid growing up. I did a lot of theatre shows in middle and high school, and when I got to college, I auditioned for the college’s improv team.
I fell in love with and did nothing but regular improv for the first few years. Then I moved to New York, and the first musical comedy show I saw was Baby Wants Candy. I thought, “Oh, this is everything I love and want to do.”
Chris: The first comedic thing I remember doing as a kid came about whilst playing a board game. I played Fictionary with my sisters, who are both ten years older. We were given obscure words, and we had to come up with definitions for them.
I think the word was “solarium.” And I wrote “A type of vegetation that grows into a perfect circle.” They found it hilarious, and I thought, “Oh, I wrote a joke.” I realised I like doing creative things that make people laugh.
To build on Adrien and Anna’s points…
“Baby Wants Candy and Shamilton! are a perfect alchemy of wildly different skill sets, which makes the shows unique and difficult to replicate.”
- Chris Grace
…But it doesn’t make us particularly employable in other scenarios, ha-ha. Although once a year, we’re on Mount Olympus in Edinburgh, Scotland.
For those who haven’t seen you before, what can they expect from this year’s run at the Fringe, and for those who have, what will be different?
Anna: They can expect a fully improvised musical with a narrative throughout. The audience gives suggestions, and we figure out a title, and we’ll do our best to execute a musical based on their ideas. As for Shamilton!, we ask the audience to suggest a historical figure and give that figure the Hamilton treatment, improvising a rap musical about them.
The true magic of both is that, regardless of whether or not they’ve seen us before, audience members come back again and again, because every time it’s truly so different.
“The audiences have given amazing suggestions for titles. We’ve done ‘HotUncles.com’… I also loved ‘Sweenie Toes, the Demon Masseuse of Feet Street,’ and ‘Moby and the Incredible Dick.’”
- Adrien Pellerin (MD)
*laughter*
…Did you really do a Shamilton! show about Genghis Khan, as I’ve read?
Chris: I’ve definitely been Genghis Khan for a Shamilton! show.
That gave me so many questions. Do you have to do on-the-spot research?
Chris: We talk a little with the audience about what they know. Often, we’ll get good information, and sometimes we’ll get shite information, that we’ll nevertheless incorporate into the show.2
If you’ve seen either show in previous years, in 2025 we’ll be charging a tariff as everyone enters.
*laughter*
Can you keep topping your Fringe shows from previous years?
Anna: Yes. Watch us.
*laughter*
Chris: I was going to say “Definitely not.”
*more laughter*
…It’s a long climb from 2011. Although the core cast has been the same for 4 years now. We’re always picking up from the year before.
“If you watched every Baby Wants Candy performance 8 years ago, that August, you would have witnessed 5 incredible shows, 15 excellent shows, and maybe 3 stinkers. Since we came back in 2022, we’ve had months where we didn’t have a single bad show.” - Chris Grace
Could you tell me about some of the most surprising audience interactions?
Adrien: The classic, the story that keeps getting passed down, although a couple of years before I joined, was when an actual baby was passed up on stage.
Chris: A woman in the second row brought a 6-month-old baby and offered it up to the cast, much like an indigenous sacrifice, ha-ha. The baby was passed around on stage for a while, and then put back.
“The show became something else at that point. Nobody really cared what the improv was. Nobody was looking at anything except the baby, and the rest of the show was just about how there had been a baby on stage. You can’t talk about anything else at that point.” - Chris Grace
It was extremely trusting of the mother. I mean, reckless in some ways, but very funny and delightful. One day, that baby will come back and be in the cast.
Any others?
Adrien: It might’ve been last year that someone offered their beer up to Ally, and Ally just started taking sips from everyone’s beer in the audience. Which, germ-wise, isn’t great.
Anna: I think that was the 2020 show.
*laughter*
Chris: And Ally had just come back from Wuhan, China.
*more laughter*
How family-friendly are both shows?
Chris: We’re listed as suitable for ages 12 and up. Our shows are pretty tame in the grand scheme of things. In the UK, we always seem to have parents bringing 7-year-olds, and I think any child of that age with access to the internet has seen worse things.
When I see parents in the line waiting, I let them know there’ll be some profanity in the show, and at least with UK audiences, universally, they’re just like “Oh, it doesn’t matter. He’s heard worse.”
“…Shamilton! feels a little more family-friendly, I’d say. It’s a little earlier in the day, and they’ve often seen Hamilton and are excited to see an improv version.” - Anna Bortnick
Chris: It’s historical, too, so they will learn something from it. We call it ‘edu-taintment.’
*laughter*
Are you ever unable to control your laughter on stage?
Adrien: A thousand per cent…
Chris: Yeah, I break a lot.
“I’m the musical director behind the keys making the music, and I don’t hold back. The whole cast cracks me up. I’m cackling throughout the whole show.”
- Adrien Pellerin (MD)
Anna: …And Adrien is my favourite laugh to get. If I’m peeking over at the band and see him laughing, I know I’m on the right track.
Adrien: I play alongside a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer. Those 3 musicians are all local Scotsmen, and they’re the best. We’re all cracking up the whole time. We all make each other laugh, and that’s what makes the show such a joy.
Chris: Then the band comes up to tell us what they liked about the show, and we can’t understand them.
*Everyone laughed*
How often do your improvisations mention animals?
Chris: Mine don’t mention animals much, because I don’t want to be forced to crawl on the ground to pretend to be one. However, in the past few years, we’ve had Zach Reino, and if he’s in the cast, you might as well add some magical foxes, because he loves playing them. We do play a lot of animals as a group.
Anna: In my first year in the cast, I feel like it was my job to “take one for the team” and crawl on the ground. In year 3? I don’t know, we’ll see.
Chris: Nowadays, Anna just points at a spot and waits for one of the newbies to do it.
Anna: Yeah.
Chris: …and that’s not even in the show. That’s in her flat.
*laughter*
Have you ever met anyone I’ve interviewed?
Chris: Well, of course, we know MC Hammersmith.
Adrien: Yeah, Will raps with us. He’s fantastic.
Chris: I’ve also done stand-up at a show in London with Alex Kealy. I split my time between improv and stand-up.
What have you learnt about improvising that you didn’t know 5 years ago?
Chris: I don’t care much about getting the show’s structure right anymore… You’ll see this year. *Much laughter* I just want the show to be good. Improv groups focus a lot on structure, and it’s a nice fall-back when things aren’t going well, but I don’t think the audience knows or cares, as long as it’s fun.
Is it good if things go wrong sometimes?
Anna: With such a quick and talented cast, if there is ever a “mistake,” which is rare in improv, it’s a happy accident. It’s a gift for the other improvisers, and it can make for a beautiful moment in a show, for things to go in a completely unexpected direction.
“Once at the Fringe, every cast member decided to take to the stage for the first scene, and we all stayed on stage until the end. I truly loved that experience of thinking, ‘No one expected to do a show like this tonight, and yet here we are.’”
- Anna Bortnick
Chris: What happens at the start is very important, because like the foreshadowing of a fiction writer, we like to end with a callback. Sometimes we end with a reprise of the opening song, and it’s really challenging to remember the melody and words of a song you made up 50 minutes ago, having sung 7 others in between.
So, you improvise the melodies as well? That’s crazy.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Anna: In my opinion… it would be much harder to memorise a bunch of pre-written melodies. That, to me, would be crazy.
Chris: It would also require so much more work than any of us are willing to do.
*everyone laughed*
…If you think about hearing a new song on the radio, it’s fairly easy to hum a melody over the music. The real challenge is coming up with the melody alongside the words, and making sure those words make sense within the show.
Plus, we have to question whether a song is even needed at that point in the show, and Adrien leads that decision. And he has to decide what to play, which establishes a genre.
Do you cover all genres?
Adrien: Oh yeah, we cover all sorts. I love what I get to do; it’s the most fun in the world. I’m paying attention to what the rest of the cast are doing on stage, and getting a sense of the vibe. Last night we were doing a show in New York, and the title gave me a Little Shop of Horrors vibe, so I threw that vibe into the opening number.
But then they went in a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory direction, so I mixed in a few emotions and motifs inspired by it. Last year, we did “Baroque to the Future” with an 80s rock and roll feel.
Chris: This year, Adrien will experiment with the drill genre. I’ll have to listen to it, I heard it’s popular in the UK.
Do you celebrate or satirise musicals?
Everyone: Both.
Adrien: A billion per cent.
“To me, the highest honour for musical theatre is to parody it. We’re making fun of the musicals because we love them so much.” - Adrien Pellerin (MD)
Some of the suggestions from the audience are direct references to existing musicals, e.g. The Phantom of the Oprah. Clearly, that’s heading in a certain direction, but even when they don’t, we’re thinking about which musicals their suggestions remind us of.
Anna: Even though the entire musical, taken as a whole, might feel like satire, when we sing those songs, it’s a celebration of musical theatre, because everyone gives their 100%. They will earnestly sing a love song about tube socks, for example. They’ll sing it with passion and joy, because it might be made up… but it’s a musical.
How does your sense of humour differ? For example, what would be a very Adrien, a very Anna, a very Chris line?
Chris: Well, first off, if we get an Adrien line, it’s been a very weird show.
*laughing*
Anna: That’s illegal.
Chris: It’s specified in his UK work VISA.
…Although he does get jokes in with the melodies he plays. If we reference pop culture, he’ll weave a musical reference into it. It’s wild that he’ll play the opening bells of Harry Potter over a samba beat, and the song’s about two senior citizens at a beach resort. It’s magical that he can find ways to blend the two.
Adrien: I also get to be an actor’s nightmare, because I might start playing a tune when one of them says, “We have to name all the flavours of the ice cream shop,” and then I can bring that tune back any time I want, to mess with that person.
Chris: Oh, and Anna has a deep knowledge of certain historical figures that comes into play when we do Shamilton.
Anna: A select few.
Chris: But they’re deep. She could give you 10 facts about certain figures.
“… In terms of a typical line that I’d say, it might be set in Victorian England, and they’re talking about a serious military crisis, and I’d come in and say, ‘Who ate my hot dogs?’” - Chris Grace
*laughter*
Adrien: Yeah, Chris is the king of the one-liner. He’ll come in and say one, and the audience will be cackling.
Anna: In a Shamilton! show, Chris is excellent at playing a King George type figure, who comes in as the bad guy and lays down the law.
Chris: Yes, I have an imperious air to me, I’d say. That’s why I feel so at home in the UK.
*laughter*
During a show, if one of you fell over without hurting yourself, how would you own it? And how might the rest of the cast react?
Anna: I love that question. It happens a lot!
Chris: A common response might be for everyone else to fall, as if the gravity got turned off at the space station.
“We also love literally picking each other up. The rest of the cast come over, lift them and make them sing from the air.”
- Anna Bortnick
Chris: I can guarantee there’s no world where it would be ignored.
*laughter*
Are the shows about being “over the top” and “extra”?
Chris: The opening number might be, but it’s definitely not over the top all the way through. We also like to set a serious tone, to mess with their expectations, or create underplayed moments.
Anna: We have over-the-top moments and moments that are like a good play.
“I love it when we have a villain, and they’re genuinely scary and serious.” - Chris Grace
Finally, what is life’s greatest treasure?
Adrien: For me, it’s in the shared experience of laughter and how infectious it is amongst a group of people. That’s all of my joy in life.
Anna: For me, it’s going to the Mosque Kitchen in Edinburgh.
*laughter*
Chris: Yeah, my answer was the Dishoom restaurant in Edinburgh. I feel I get more joy from Dishoom than from the shared laughter.
Anna: Eating good food after an improv show with your friends is kind of the best thing ever.
Well, that was one hell of a way to do my first group interview, a truly incredible experience. I’m immensely thankful. I will listen to the recording anytime I need to cheer myself up. You can follow Baby Wants Candy and Shamilton! on Instagram, and grab tickets to see them here and here. But the preview shows are all that’s currently on sale.
Comments and likes are essential for the article’s reach. If you can’t think of what to say, let me know which colour your socks are today, or tell me the colour of your tunic… if you’re wearing a tunic.
The crew even pocketed an uncommon 5-star review from The Scotsman.
Can I just mention, hearing an American say “shite” caught me off guard. We’ve been infiltrated.
Great first group interview 😂
Great interview, I laughed - a lot!