Jenna Warriner on the spot in Songbuster
Jenna Warriner doesn’t embarrass easily. You can try, but she’ll usually have a way to turn any awkward situation into a laugh. She doesn’t even mind if a few hundred people are watching.
For the Niagara Falls-born actress and comedian, improv is her comfort zone. Only one thing left to do — add music. On the spot.
Warriner is among the cast of Bad Dog Theatre’s “Songbuster,” a musical-on-thefly being performed at the company’s Bloor Street West home in Toronto Dec. 20. With suggestions from the audience, the troupe will create music and storylines, bringing their improv game to another level.
“We’ve taken something that is already really hard and made it even harder,” says Warriner, who now lives in Toronto.
Warriner has starred in TV shows including “The Beaverton” and “Ca$h Mob,” and brought her one-woman show “Girl’s End: A Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” to Toronto’s Fringe Festival in 2016. But she’s equally comfortable working without a script, and “Songbuster” — a monthly tradition for Bad Dog Theatre — puts its performers through the wringer.
The only pre-set part of the show is the chorus-verse format of the first song. “Other than that, it’s a bunch of blind people up there making it work,” she says. “Then we do a fully improvised musical.”
Like most improv, stories are created and changed on a whim, but add the challenge of songs to the mix and the cast can work themselves into tough jams. Which is often when the funniest stuff happens.
“We always say that mistakes are gifts,” she says. “The funny thing is watching you dig yourself out of the trouble you got into. Sometimes the entire trajectory of the show can change because someone thought of a rhyme while they were singing. They like, reveal that they’re someone’s evil twin, and we’re grabbing our faces like, ‘OK! You said it so it’s true now!’”
Every improv performer hits the stage “accepting that they may fail,” says Warriner. But the rest of the cast and the audience is like a safety net.
“I don’t ever love having to practise something in front of a paying audience, but you have to just keep going out there and know that anything you mess up — if your company is supporting you — any mistake has the potential to be the best part of the show.”
The show is Dec. 20, 8 p.m., at Bad Dog Theatre in Toronto (875 Bloor St. W.). Tickets are $20, available at www.baddogtheatre.com.