Show History

“The Great British Baking Parody” premiered on YouTube on May 18, 2020 to a delighted virtual audience from all over the country. Cast and audience members participated in a live virtual chat throughout the event, cheering on the contestants and enjoying the new-to-many experience of attending a live theater event from the comfort of their own homes!

This show is Holly and Lee’s second playwriting collaboration (their first was “That Perfect Kiss,” which premiered at the Q Collective’s 2019 Coming Out Play Festival). It began as a submission to the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis’s Virtual Playwright Bakeoff, which was announced toward the beginning of the St. Louis Stay at Home Order. When Holly and Lee realized they’d both been watching a lot of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix, they decided to take the term “bakeoff” literally and write a script in honor of one of their favorite quarantine pastimes!

The bakeoff prompt gave the authors five “ingredients” or prompts to incorporate into their script, which were 1) a line from a Shakespeare play, 2) a delivery, 3) a mistaken identity, 4) an element of either fire, water, earth, or air, and 5) something ugly transformed into something beautiful. Lee and Holly decided to assign one ingredient to each baker (which automatically set the scene in the quarterfinals.) Holly immediately thought of one of her favorite bands, Earth, Wind and Fire, as the perfect option for the fourth ingredient, so the showstopper challenge became having the contestants bake a cake in honor of their favorite musical artist. Holly and Lee also wanted to tie in a nod to Tom Howe’s fantastic musical scoring of the Great British Baking Show, so they made each contestant’s song a parody mash-up that paired one of those iconic melodies with the accompaniment of a hit song from the contestant’s “favorite artist.”

Though their script didn’t turn out to be the right fit for the Shakespeare Festival Bakeoff, they loved it so much that they decided to produce it themselves, and the next stage of the production began! Amidst a whirlwind of finishing up the school year, checking in with British cultural consultants Kirsty Williamson and Janet Buchanan to make tweaks to the script, and setting dates for the rehearsals and performance, the show was cast with seven excellent actors from St. Louis and beyond (a fully remote production allowed the unusual opportunity to invite non-local actors to join the cast), and it was time to begin rehearsing the show!

The first rehearsal was held via Zoom on May 4, 2020 with each actor connecting from their home. Three more Zoom rehearsals (featuring inspired homemade props and costumes and the occasional surprise visit from a pet) were held on May 11, May 14, and May 17, and the show premiered on YouTube on May 18 at 7:30 pm CDT. The double countdown began at 7:13 and 7:15, respectively :-D, the pre-show began at 7:19 pm, and the show was immediately followed by a live Q&A session over Zoom.

The ultimate goal of producing the show during this unusual time was to provide joy and a sense of connection to the cast, creative team, and audience alike, and this goal was met with resounding success! If you’d like to get a serving of that joy for yourself, just scroll down to watch the show!