Four years ago, veteran Vancouver TheatreSports League improviser Brian Anderson came up with an idea for a show that has become a seasonal tradition. Each year, the villainous Christmas Queen sets out to ruin the holidays, only to have goodness prevail. The show’s over-the-top panto inanity doesn’t come at the expense of its heart. It manages to send Christmas up and embrace it at the same time.

While the titular character is a constant, the show’s story line and elements change from year to year to keep things fresh. This time around, inspiration is drawn from Disney.

“The underlying theme is Freaky Friday—Santa and the Christmas Queen end up doing a body swap,” says Anderson on the phone during a break from blowing things up, one of his day-job responsibilities at Science World. “It’s a chance for each person to learn a little bit about themselves and about humanity in general just from walking in the person’s shoes.”

The larger-than-life characterizations, audience participation, and campy fun of the panto form make it a great fit with improvised storytelling. “Improv itself is not known for being particularly subtle sometimes, so it’s a chance to play some of those bigger characters,” says Anderson. “We get a lot more families coming down for it. It’s very high-energy, a lot of back-and-forth with the silliness of booing the villain and cheering the heroes as things go along.”

Anderson has a long history with, and fondness for, such theatrics. As a teenager in Courtenay on Vancouver Island, he got his first taste of the broader aspects of live performance.

“My first memory of doing a show in junior high was as a traditional melodrama villain with the black cape and the twirly mustache,” he remembers.

While that was loads of fun to play, he decided to study math, computer science, and physics at the University of Victoria with the aim of becoming a physics teacher. He even did a work term at Stanford’s big particle accelerator before moving into IT.

But the lure of the greasepaint drew him back to the stage. “I found after a couple years of that, it’s a pretty high-intensity grind,” he says. “There’s not really a lot of chance for balancing your left brain/right brain on that.”

He started taking workshops with TheatreSports and hasn’t looked back.

With suggestions being fired at you every time you’re on-stage, it pays to have a cast with varied interests. Anderson can draw on his academic background.

“I’m surprised how often a smattering of science comes into an improv scene,” he says. “We got a suggestion of trigonometry the other night, so I just threw in a reference, ‘SOHCAHTOA, opposite over adjacent’. The bar’s set pretty low for looking smart sometimes.”

During the course of Christmas Queen 4’s December run, you may or may not see Anderson in the role he created. The cast is always rotating at VTSL, so some nights it might be Pearce Visser or Randy Schooley or Scott Patey or Allen Morrison or anyone letting their id run free.

“When you throw on that blue wig, it’s total carte blanche to go wild, to abuse the audience in ways that would not normally be socially acceptable,” he says.

And as an audience member, you get to give it back to the evil monarch in equal doses. If you tend towards shyness, don’t fret. You can enjoy it all from the comfort of your seat at the Improv Centre on Granville Island.

“A very big part of the philosophy at TheatreSports is that we don’t want anyone to participate who doesn’t want to participate,” Anderson says. “We’ll never force anybody to be involved. But I think what’s fun and playful in the panto form is if your level of participation is sitting in the audience and yelling ‘Boo!’ that’s perfectly fine. If your level is coming up and doing some sound effects or moving somebody around, there are opportunities for that, too. It’s the level you’re comfortable with.”

Christmas Queen 4—Secret Santa runs Wednesdays through Saturdays until December 23 (with special showings December 10, 17, and 19) at the Improv Centre on Granville Island.