Imagine getting ready to perform in a musical. Along with your friends, you will sing and act, while a band conjures up the melodies and rhythms to spice up the story.

Now imagine you suddenly forgot what story you were supposedly performing. Worse, none of your fellow actors or musicians remember either. But the show must go on, so all you can do is improvise. And you have to improvise everything: the lines, the plot, the music, the lyrics, the timing. Everything from scratch, without a moment’s hesitation.

Sounds difficult, right?

Well, that is what Baby Wants Candy goes through routinely—except they are not forgetting anything. A professional musical improv group, they improvise entire one-act musical comedies based solely on the first phrase the audience offers as a title.

Based in Chicago, the troupe has performed extensively in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York as well as in other major cities in a number of countries. Having befriended the Pippin cast at the Fringe festival in Scotland this past summer, they will come here to perform at Blackford’s theater on February 4.

The group comprises two parts: the band of instrumentalists and the ensemble of actors. In a phone interview with The Winged Post, co-founder and ensemble member Albert Samuels and musical director Jody Shelton described the group’s process of putting on such impromptu shows.

A show begins with instrumentals: about five to 10 seconds after the audience calls out the title of the musical, the downbeat of the score must ring. It is up to Shelton, who as musical director both plays music and conducts the band, to decide the mood and setting of the musical.

“I have to think fast and communicate my ideas to the band as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Shelton said. “I’m thinking like a musical or a film score: musically, what is evocative of that title?”

Using his fingers to make numeric cues that correspond to chords, he signals to the band the first notes, and the music begins.

Meanwhile, Samuels said, the actors onstage experience similar thought processes. As soon as they hear the title, they have a few seconds to consider what the words mean and, as music begins to sound, what feelings the melody evokes and what kind of world—what time period and location—the characters might inhabit.

When the lights first come on, it is almost certain that each person onstage has a different conception of what the plot entails. To stay in sync, they follow what Shelton calls the “Yes-And” rule. First, a person with strong ideas makes a first move, an “initiation,” which establishes a tone, fleshes out characterizations, or advances the plot. For the ensemble, the initiation could be a song or a line of dialogue; for the band, a change in beat or harmony.

The other performers then say “yes,” adapt to the development, and add some of their own ideas to the mix.

For Shelton, that “Yes-And” rule is “the most important rule in improv” and is “100 percent” what Baby Wants Candy does.

“We build something together,” he said.

Given the importance of cooperation to the success of their musicals, Samuels and Shelton add that the troupe strives for that closeness and comfort gained from spending ample time together on and offstage—that dynamic they call the “group mind.”

“It’s really very, very important for our show,” Samuels said. “So one of the things we look for when we bring in new people is do they hang around? Do they get that group mind?”

Because of the variety of shows they put on and the frequency of travel, they “have to recast all the time,” Shelton said. For larger shows, they may have six actors onstage and six members in the band; for smaller ones, such as the upcoming one at this school, they might have just four actors and Shelton acting as a one-man band.

But as long as the newer members meld into the group mind, the shows proceed smoothly.

“A lot of people that are with me on stage I may not even know that well,” he said. “Some I’ve known for 10 years, and some for 10 minutes.”

Indeed, Baby Wants Candy started out quite different from the musical comedy troupe it is today.

While training in Chicago for an upcoming performance, the founding members—Ali Davis, Peter Gwinn, Bob Kulhan, Stuart Ranson, and Samuels—decided to form an improv troupe.

“At first we weren’t in musicals, but when we started improvising musicals, we found out it was really well received by the audience. They loved it,” Samuels said.

After rising in popularity in Chicago, the troupe branched out to other major cosmopolitan cities, particularly Los Angeles and New York City. However, a couple of years after the group’s inception, the performers were going to split up. According to Samuels, they planned to have a few last performances in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Those shows went “really, really well—so [they] decided to stay together,” Samuels said.

Soon after, Shelton came on board as musical director and “really took the group to a whole new level,” Samuels said.

To further expand, they regularly solicit new performers and set up casting sessions.

On its website, the group offers a few lighthearted reasons they chose the name Baby Wants Candy, including an anecdote about pacifying a crying baby with candy and an explanation about finding inspiration from a movie character.

However, their name hardly compares to some of the bizarre titles that they have received for their musicals. Samuels’s and Shelton’s favorites include “The Adventures of Super Badger,” “Vampire Beauty Pageant,” and “Occupy Sesame Street,” among many others.

“You have to be prepared for anything,” Samuels said regarding their rehearsals and warm-ups. “It’s physically impossible to prepare for something you don’t know.”

While it is part of their job to make any title work, they strive to make each performance creative and surprising. Their musical on February 6 will be preceded by an improv workshop for students during the first half of the show. Tickets are currently on sale and can be purchased at [email protected].