Edinburgh Reviews: Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray

Well, this was the cheapest thing I saw all festival, being as it was just £5 for me, a student, to sit up on the slopes of the upper circle. Since then I’ve seen this show being given a bit of a slagging off in the national press, so I’ll leave those interested in the show’s shortcomings to read reviews by people more widely read than me. I quite enjoyed it, thought the whole thing was brilliantly performed and, for the most part, well choreographed (though it is slightly uneven; the opening half hour sets a high standard which the show finds it hard to live up to all the time), holding my attention throughout. The best thing about the show, however, is the design, both lighting and set, and, to a lesser extent, the sound and costumes. The production of this show is absolutely fantastic, and worth the money alone (and I don’t just mean because it was £5).

It’s true that Bourne doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about what a modern Dorian Gray might be, but I can’t agree with the critics who say that the doppelganger is a poor substitute for a portrait. How on earth would an onstage portrait be an effective part of a ballet? Anyway, in some ways the concept hasn’t been completely discarded, with both the art works on the wall in Gray’s appartment, and the billboard featuring Gray which makes two contrasting appearances during the show, carrying on the idea of art mirroring Gray’s moral decline in life. The doppelganger is a bit rubbish not because it’s a bad idea, but because it’s not very well executed: the doppelganger doesn’t especially display the decline that one might expect, either in appearance or expressed (noticeably, at any rate) in the choreography.

Other detractors, including some of the friends with whom I saw the show (admittedly more musically literate than me), have taken issue with the music, which is quite stylised and electronic. Personally, I quite liked it; it’s not like I’d want to buy a CD of it, but it suits the production and sits well alongside the choreography, without drawing too much attention to itself most of the time.

So ultimately, not Bourne’s best work by any means, but probably not deserving of the backlash which it received in some quarters.

3/5

(of course, if I marked the show on the same scale as the Fringe stuff I’ve been reviewing, it would be 5/5, but there seems little point in doing that)

Edinburgh Reviews: Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler – Double Down Hearts

Apparently Kristen Schaal is in Flight of the Concords, which is one of those programmes that so many people tell me I will like that I’ve become quite resistant to actually seeing it. Nevertheless, Kristen Schaal is also occasionally on the Daily Show, and has been very funny and a bit unexpected on that, so I thought I’d go see this show.

A stand-up duo is not an especially conventional way to do comedy, but in this case it works pretty well; the two bounce off each other with a comfortable chemistry, developing a snappy stop-start rythmn to their exchanges that emphasizes not so much embarrasment as a slight awkwardness. The two don’t so much have a stand-up show as a series of bits, joined together with little bouts of banter. Sometimes the show feels a bit desperate to keep up a constant barrage of new, different stuff, roving between a pastiche play in three parts, two audience members being invited onto stage to win a (live, onstage) date with Kristen Schaal, and some video-based silliness in a wood with fluffy animals. It would be easy to accuse the show of being “of the ADD generation”, or somesuch, but actually, everything naturally seems to flow into the next thing, and the restlessness struck me as springing not from a lack of ability to sustain ideas, but from the urge to be unpredictable. It certainly succeeds there: the show is relentlessly funny, containing for me some of the biggest laughs of the Fringe. Best bit? The “live onstage sex act”. You don’t get to say that very often.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Clive James In The Evening

I have always enjoyed Clive James as a TV personality and occasionally, when I can be arsed, as a writer, so when I read his article in G2 I figured I’d see what his attempts at stand-up might be like. Unfortunately, he more or less admits defeat at the outset of this show, telling us straight off that there are “other people out there” who can do the modern, quick-witted style of stand-up much better than he can. He tries to excuse himself by saying that he hopes that he brings a sense of “the world” to the show which will make up for this, but the trouble with that as an argument is that there are plenty of stand-ups who do engage with the world at large, and have all the other presentational slickness James admits he lacks.

It was pretty telling that I think I was the youngest person in the audience by a good twenty or thirty years, a couple of days into the run of the show. Clearly there was little buzz about the show attracting anything other than an audience of loyal followers. Nonetheless, I can think of worse ways to spend an hour; occasionally, James is genuinely hilarious, but the overall effect is of a slightly half-arsed attempt, the main intention of which is to sell his new book. Which is all very well at the book festival, but not really if you are listing yourself in the Fringe guide as a comedy show. The show seemed self-indulgent, because I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent as James couldn’t have written a better, sharper stand-up show if he really wanted to.

2/5

Edinburgh Reviews: London Gay Men’s Quoir – Far From Kansas

We saw these guys on the Royal Mile doing a slot on one of the little stages, and it looked fun enough, so we thought we’d go along and see them. The offer of free sparkling wine on the flier helped, too. Sure enough, “fun” is pretty much the one word you would use to describe this show. Basically, the show is a series of show-tunes, performed under the umbrella concept that they are being sung as an act of worship by some kind of religious movement (The “Friends of Dorothy”) who hold the Wizard of Oz story to be a religious text. The songs bringing out the three divine qualities of love, intelligence, and bravery (but without much intelligence).

The singing isn’t the best you’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty good, and they all blend together well, and the soloists are all good and sing songs that suit them. It’s musically pretty competent, but it could go a little bit further to provide some fireworks in the arrangement and the vocals occasionally. But ultimately, it’s almost pointless to try to evaluate the show like that, because it is so infectiously fun that it’s pretty much impossible to come away having had anything other than a good time.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Stephen K Amos – Find The Funny

Last year’s show, More of Me, was my first introduction to Amos, and I found it honest and interesting, as well as being well performed, slick, etc. This year, the show is just about finding the things to laugh about in everyday life, and there are a number of gags that are exactly the same as the last show (eg. waiting for Lenny Henry to die -> the BBC’s “one in, one out” diversity policy). Unfortunately, this year Amos comes across as rather more abrasive and arrogant; his way of dealing with heckling is pretty heavy-handed, even extending it to people who haven’t actually heckled, just shouted out something a bit silly when invited to respond to some question or other. This, combined with the fact that the show doesn’t have the honest, confessional feel that last year’s show did, and the slightly self-congratulatory gimmick of getting a member of the audience to count the laughs, left me feeling somewhat less well disposed to Amos than I did last year. It all seemed a bit smug.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that Stephen K Amos is a very good stand-up, assured and funny. The show this year may have been treading water (come on, “Find the Funny”? What kind of a title is that? It tells you no more about the content of the show than the fact that it’s listed in the Comedy section of the Fringe brochure), but you never feel like you’ve wasted your money. So… yeah.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Lucy Porter – The Bare Necessities

Lucy Porter is affable enough, but this show was rather less than the sum of its parts, at least on the night I saw it. Her usual little tales of everyday life, her talking to the audience and being a bit inappropriate with some of the male members of the audience shtick, her general warmth, etc., are all present and correct, but this show felt like a bit of a rag-bag. There’s not much to join it all up, with the result that I found Porter more enjoyable in short, deliberately unconnected doses as the compere of one of those “BBC Presents” late night line-ups. A bit disappointing, really, after last year’s show.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: John Gordillo – Divide and Conga

John Gordillo says he set out to write a show about politics, but ended up realising he was simply having a hypothetical argument with his (spanish communist) dad, so made it more explicitly about that instead. The result is a show that is in exactly the vein I tend to look for in comics: it has a subject, a thesis which the comic wants to explain to the audience; it is engaging with the world rather than simply looking for laughs from all directions. My only problem with it, really, is that on the night I saw it, Gordillo repeatedly made it clear that we as an audience weren’t laughing as much as he would have liked, or as much as previous audiences.

Perhaps we weren’t, but then there’s nothing that kills the mood more than a comic drawing attention to this fact and then not really going anywhere with the observation. The sooner Gordillo learns to stop doing this to himself, the sooner he will find himself able to win over those audiences he finds initially disappointing. Anyway, this is not the most gut-bustingly funny material you’ve ever seen, and it’s all the better for that. Gordillo is not in it just to make people laugh, that much is clear from this set, and that’s not a bad thing.

As for the actual content of the show, it needs a bit of a reworking. I suspect that, as Gordillo’s dad made his way more and more to the centre-stage position he occupied in the show by the time I saw it, the introduction of the central idea of the show (that political extremists divide the world into an “us” and “them”, and then project their own suspected failings onto the “them”) had shifted itself towards the status of something like a “final thought”. It would have been better to find a way to place it closer to the start, I suspect, to give the show a bit more focus and structure.

Also, the common argument-with-someone-who-isn’t-there-to-defend-themselves trope which much of the stuff about Gordillo’s dad fell into comes to feel a bit unfair on his dad when it runs right through the show rather than being a ten minute bit of a show about something wider, despite all of Gordillo’s attempts to be fair by slipping in a few things he feels his dad would probably say by way of response to him. Ultimately, he is still diagnosing the psychological failings of someone who isn’t there to answer back, and in making the show quite so much about his father personally rather than as an example of a broader point, he made this a bit uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, not entirely without laughter, and with a commendable determination to look a little deeper than your average stand-up

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Departure Lounge

Departure Lounge tells the story of four “lads on tour” over the course of an hour sat in the departure lounge of a spanish airport, looking back over their time on holiday and, through flashbacks and songs, unravelling the various secrets of the four. Sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t.

I was encouraged to see this show by the MD of our show, who absolutely loved it and had, by the time I saw it with him, been four or five times. It had quite a lot to live up to when I saw it, then, and it nevertheless impressed me. This is, in the least patronising way possible, exactly the kind of show that the Fringe is for. Small cast, limited budget, hour-long format, and perfectly formed and brilliantly performed. All too often shows come to Edinburgh whose success is in making you want to see a bigger and better production of the same material; nobody could say that about Departure Lounge.

The performances are perfectly pitched, all of the cast are professionals and can sing beautifully (a relief in the world of Edinburgh Fringe musicals, I can tell you), but really the genius of this show lies in the writing. Dougal Irvine’s score and libretto are exactly right for the show and for the hour-long format, the plot perfectly paced, the dialogue for the most part very believable, and the music a cut above your average musical theatre tunes without showing off. The writing uses songs economically and to great effect, each song having a clear purpose in the narrative (usually at least two purposes, actually).

Whilst I was in Edinburgh, I saw a couple of reviewers fall into that age old trap of assuming that depicting something was the same thing as advocating it, sniffily dismissing the show as “not as ironic as it thinks it is” and so on. All I can say on that account is that these people are hopeless and shouldn’t be allowed to review shows; Departure Lounge goes out of its way to make clear in one or two satirical songs that there is a rather unpleasant side to the kind of Brits Abroad that it shows, so I can only assume that you have to be the most joyless lefty around to grudge the show its use of these ingredients – the kind of people who give “political correctness” a bad name.

If I had one problem with the show, it is the slightly clumsy way in which the central metaphor of the show is shoe-horned into the dialogue in the middle of the show, the most thoughtful of the lads just dropping it into conversation, accompanied by a little “I’ve just had a funny thought” marker. The show doesn’t need this, the final song contains enough for people to pick this aspect of the show up unaided, I would say.

Still, marvellous stuff, the best musical I saw in Edinburgh.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee’s show last year was one of the only things I tried to go see and couldn’t because it was sold out, so I was pleased to be able to rectify the situation this year with a visit to The Stand, a comedy club with a much smaller capacity and profile than the Udderbelly, where Lee played last year (Lee’s performing there was, apparently, a protest against the self-appointed Edinburgh Comedy Festival brand which four big venue operators created this year).

Boy, am I glad I did. Stewart Lee is easily one of the best stand-ups I’ve seen, and one of the best suited to what I seek in stand-up (basically, the comic has something they want to explore with the audience, and the comedy is there to make it entertaining as well as just interesting). It helps that Lee is mostly in harmony with my liberal sensibilities (go find his bit on Political Correctness on YouTube), and that he has such a fantastically dry delivery. I don’t think I have ever seen someone more confident in taking as much time about what they are saying as they like; it adds so much to the performance, because the anticipation of the next line is often as funny as the payoff.

I’m not sure that the picking two of six topics each night was all that interesting for the show, but since the show was explicitly a device for Lee to workshop material for a TV series, I’m not really worried by that. I look forward to the TV series.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Brendon Burns

Last year, Brendon Burns won the if.comedy award for his stand-up show after years of being at the Fringe, playing in small venues and with a reputation for being a not-very-notable shock merchant who frequently crossed the line between ironic and just wantonly offensive. Last year, he says, was a product of getting rid of his drug habit and making his show more consistently professional, and coming up with a slick, tight set. This year, he says, is “a thank-you” to the people who supported him throughout his career. Unfortunately, that seems to mean that he’s slid backwards a bit; this year’s show was a little bit flabby and, to me anyway, the material was nothing special. There are moments of brilliance when Burns lays into people who clearly genuinely annoy him (like broadsheet readers or French speakers in Canada), rather than simply chucking bombs into well-known areas of sensitivity like race in South Africa and the controversy over the guy who died in Barrymore’s pool.

That said, those who enjoy this whole shock-comedy thing more than I do will love it.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Soweto Gospel Quoir

I’m not much of a choral music person, or a Gospel person, so I’m probably not the ideal audience for this kind of show. It’s pretty amazing, but I had a few niggles that stopped me from really loving every minute in the same way that most of my friends who saw it did:

1. I don’t like listening to people sing in a language I don’t understand; they might be singing “burn the gays in the name of the spaghetti monster” for all I know.
2. The sound design was trying too hard – voices this good don’t need smothering in that much reverb.

Still, the show is commendable in many ways, and really worth the time of even someone like me for whom it is not an obvious choice. A conscious effort has been made to break up the hour long slot, with a run of “oddball” songs and bits of dance in the middle of the show, and the enthusiasm of every single performer on the stage is infectious.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Edges

Edges is a song cycle about the slightly directionless lives of four young people trying to find themselves a life and a partner they like. The songs themselves are good, the music well written and characterful. The direction of the show was good, the lighting and sound smoothly unnoticed by most. Unfortunately, the performers in this production weren’t all quite up to the standard required, particularly in their singing. One was consistently flat, another had an annoying fake vibrato that he obviously felt was “the kind of thing you need in musical theatre”, another needed more control of the sheer volume of her voice, and one wasn’t as bad as the others. Also, I wasn’t convinced by the more gimmicky bits of the show, where video projection was used to project two brief scenes which needn’t have been there at all, and a song about Facebook, which is territory that has already been well explored by other comic songs.

Not a terrible show, all in all, but the cast could have improved the show significantly by getting some singing lessons.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Reginald D Hunter

Last year I enjoyed Reg D Hunter’s show, but felt that the show wasn’t quite the coherent intellectual statement that Hunter might have liked to think, and that it contained some comments that were mostly there to please an audience of shock junkies (an increasing Edinburgh Fringe demographic in comedy audiences, sadly). Both of these issues have been addressed for this year’s show, leaving a man whose comedy is exactly my cup of tea: intelligent and with an intent behind it to communicate something as well as make people laugh. In this case, Hunter’s show, “No Country For Grown Men” addresses the sense that men are being emasculated by today’s gender politics. He begins this discussion with an anecdote about going into an empty ladies’ loo to get toilet paper upon finding none in the gents, before notifying the management of the bar afterwards, only to be told that he should not have entered the ladies’ in the first place. “It’s not like, if a woman had walked in, I would have panicked and raped them”, he complains. This sets the tone for the show: funny, but you could well take issue with it if you took it seriously. The only flaw in Hunter’s set this year, I think, is that he ducks out of having a serious conversation before it has even started, with a spiel about finding people who are offended by his comedy ridiculous because obviously, if it says “comedy club” on the door, there is the distinct possibility that he was joking. This is a fair point, but you didn’t find Bill Hicks using that as a way to duck out of defending his views.

5/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Jason Byrne

Byrne is an old Fringe favourite, with a mix of chat to the audience (when he frequently finds himself hilarious) and pre-written material on pretty average themes (marriage, moving house, etc). He is a very capable comedian, but the trouble is he is something of a jack of all trades. His banter with the audience is not up to the standard of, say, Ross Noble or Lucy Porter, while his material, even if you are looking for such everyday subject matters, is not on the level of any number of other comics, most notably at this year’s Fringe Michael MacIntyre. His finale, getting a bunch of audience members on stage to perform their own Riverdance, is funny and has a certain maniacal quality, but can’t quite escape a feeling of forced zanyness.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Assassins

Stephen Sondheim’s musical about the various people to have attempted (successfully or otherwise) to assassinate presidents of the USA, from John Wilkes Booth onwards, is not your average musical, with no chorus to speak of, and a subject matter that could easily make for a monotonously dark show. To make it work, the show must be intelligently performed and directed, and this production pulled it off admirably. The opening song was a little bit weak in the singing department (I thought), but the rest of the show was slick, engagingly performed, funny where it should be, and dark where it should be, culminating in a scene where the other assassins all urge Lee Harvey Oswald to go through with his attempt on JFK’s life, because his act gives the rest of them context and meaning.

The show is very Sondheim musically, with songs being used to explore the minds of the assassins and their place in history, intelligently written but rarely the kind of song you come away humming. A small band did a good job, complimenting the polished performances on stage. Very little set to speak of, and a rather unambitious lighting design, meant that the show was technically unadventurous, but was at least radio miced competently.

If Kiss of the Spider Woman made me want to see someone do their show on a larger, professional scale, then Assassins made me want to go and be involved in a production of my own.

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: WitTank – Sexy Pudding

Having seen WitTank last year in Rocket Venues (they’ve moved up in the world, and deservedly so), I was expecting great things of this show. And yes, it’s more of the same, and some sketches are genuinely hilarious. The average level of humour, though, seems to me to be a bit lower than it was last year. And again, the funniest bits are those where the actors are trying to make each other corpse.

Still, WitTank have consistently demonstrated themselves to be a capable student sketch show, and are usually a good way to spend a light hearted hour.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Kiss of the Spider Woman

This show was also in the sauna which Plague was given, but somehow I didn’t mind so much here. I’ve never seen this musical before, so I can’t comment on the cutting of the script to make it fit into its late night slot, other than to say that the show didn’t feel as if it had been gutted or made no sense. The show isn’t the most uplifting thing you’ve ever seen, but if you like musical theatre then it’s a cracker nevertheless, and if you’re just there for the acting, then it’s pretty moving. Molina was brilliantly acted, XXXX less so (not really his fault, he just wasn’t great casting for the role, and didn’t really come across as rugged enough to be a revolutionary), making their relationship slightly less believable than it might have been – a shame for a show that hangs on these two actors quite so heavily.

Elsewhere, the “spider woman” had a strong voice and some strong songs to go with it, sadly undermined by a faulty radio mic on the night I saw the show (on that note, the taping of mic capsules to the faces of the actors was some of the messiest and most obvious I have seen in some time). The live band across the back of the stage left a reduced area for the actors, but were a worthwhile use of resources nonetheless, with no obviously weak playing going on, and a big energy boost to the show from their presence. The reduced stage was well dealt with by the cleverly versatile set, making the most of the limitations dealt to it (both by the lack of depth to the stage and by the obviously small budget).

The chorus of the show were generally pretty flawless, with all the supporting character parts well acted without upstaging the lead actors. That said, the chorus numbers with the prisoners singing about “over the wall” made me and my friends really want to see the show done in a big theatre with a chorus of more than six and a big, well lit set (lighting was the other technical problem with this show, often seemingly being plotted on the fly, despite being several nights into the run when I saw it).

4/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Plague! The Musical

This is a tricky review to write, since these guys were C venues colleagues of ours, and unsureness what to write here is one of the reasons I lapsed into such crapness about keeping up with these reviews. Now that the fringe is over, it seems less problematic, although I won’t feel any less awkward about the thought that they might read it, but…

It was pretty ropey, really. The cast threw themselves into it for the most part, and some of them were indeed quite talented (the leading man and two leading ladies). The trouble was, the script wasn’t so great, and some of the cast had those annoying little habits which really get to you after a few minutes, and a certain lack of stagecraft. The alchemist, for instance, was never onstage for more than a few seconds without doing the same quite irritating little conjuring gesture. If he was on for, say, a whole song, this meant that he did it continuously, throughout the song.

The idea of projecting a representative cartoon scene onto a screen in the absence of actual scenery was nice, but the screen being on the extreme stage right was… odd. The singers weren’t miced, but that was alright because the music was from a backing track. The show was musically not bad, and some of the cast were actually fairly good singers. That said, not many of the songs were all that memorable.

The main problem, though, was that the show was just a bit long and involved. A guy goes to London and falls in love with a girl whose father is a sworn enemy of the man he gets a job with. And then something pretty indecipherable about rats happens, everyone gets the plague, the girl dies, death comes to collect her in a rather sub-Pratchett little scene, and then something else about the rats, and it’s all ok. That’s the basic framework, but there’s a few other bits and bobs hanging off it. Essentially, there’s just a bit too much. Maybe it’s just that I needed the loo and the venue was literally a sauna, so I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I think it’s certainly fair to say that the show could be seriously improved by someone with a red pen and an unsentimental eye being given a couple of hours with the libretto.

2/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Kiddy-Fiddler On The Roof

Interesting one this one. The attention-grabbing title is a bit cringeworthy, but once you get beyond that, there’s some good stuff here. Essentially, the plot follows a disaeffected young man who accuses a teacher he is upset with of inappropriate behaviour, creating an unholy alliance between the PTA and the local press which seeks to hound him from his job.

The show is musically not memorable, but certainly competent for the most part (some seriously wayward violin playing notwithstanding), with many of the cast having average to good voices. The writing is somewhat hackneyed in places (the “nation’s matriarch” character seeming so familiar it felt like she’d wandered in from about six other fictional worlds at once), but the actors give it their all, and the show is slick enough and well directed enough to, for the most part, pull it off.

The venue, Roxy Main, is not ideal for a musical as lightly mic’d as this one (the actors seemed to be wearing radio mics on their lapels, but any resultant amplification was undetectable to this sound designer), since the wide stage with audience on three sides and reverberant acoustics mean that lyrics are almost never heard by the whole audience at once. This had the bizarre effect of creating little pockets of laughter in the audience in those regions which had heard a particular joke.

And that’s the other thing that should be mentioned about this show: yes, it is funny. This seemed to wrongfoot some of the people who I saw the show with, who felt that the subject matter was simply not to be made fun of. The trouble for the moral outrage brigade is that the show makes very few attempts to find fun in the subject of paedophilia. Like the 2001 Brass Eye Special before it, this show is more interested in mocking Middle England’s propensity for moral panic when it is mentioned. In doing this, it is sometimes succesful, but about as often it misses the mark, because it’s not at all clear what the point being made is. The show makes a half arsed attempt towards the end to have a “message”, but it practically admits that it doesn’t really know what it is.

So… I enjoyed the show, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it even more if I’d been able to hear it all, and I might even have been clearer on the show’s point. As it is, it’s hard to pass judgment on the show. It’s never going to be a classic, but it’s not terrible – there are worse things around at the Fringe, by a long way.

3/5

Edinburgh Reviews: Clever Peter

Quite straightforwardly the funniest student sketch review I have ever seen. Well written, well performed, and simply very funny, this is an hour of perfectly formed comedy. It doesn’t do crappy little smart-alec throwaway bits (except for when it does and they’re very funny), it makes the effort to actually provide us with an over-arching little plot device and a reason for the show’s name, and just when you think it’s going a bit clever, a man in a gorilla costume appears and has rapes someone.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this show, other than that everyone who likes sketch shows should go see it, and that I would be surprised if none of the three guys in the show go on to greater things.

5/5