Comedy
theartsdesk
Tiffany Stevenson ★★★★The comic is currently appearing on Show Me the Funny on ITV, where her smily disposition is a welcome antidote to some of the sneery critics they have mustered. There’s boyfriend stuff in Cavewoman but Stevenson also delivers a few astute political observations, as well as the occasional unPC gag - such as suggesting Tina Turner's dance moves were inspired by her avoiding Ike’s punches.There are some nice riffs about going to a bingo session with her mother and the weird sisterhood she saw there, her penchant for leopardskin prints (you can take the girl out of...), the Read more ...
theartsdesk
A three-piece hailing from Seattle and its environs, The Cave Singers are an authentically hairy proposition. With his tweed hat and red beard, at this Edge festival gig singer Pete Quirk looked like a cross between the late Robin Cook and a stray leprechaun from Finian’s Rainbow, while Derek Fudesco dispensed his lovely, liquid guitar lines from beneath a blur of flying hair.On record their trippy psych-folk-rock is often rather bucolic, like Fleet Foxes with more edge and on weirder drugs. On stage, however, they closed ranks, dispensing with many of the textures of their studio work and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
DeAnne Smith, Gilded Balloon **** Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish clothing and Bieberesque hairstyle. And don’t be fooled either by the way her act begins with a riff on existential angst - prompted by an Australian waiter saying “No worries” when he took her order - which turns into a song (one of a few in the set) accompanied by a ukulele. Don’t be fooled because you’ll realise there’s a lot of much edgier and darker material that she gets away with because she looks and sounds so sweet.Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.The Search for Happiness isn't as high-concept Cook's previous Fringe outings, but no less enjoyable for that because can make a room happy just by chatting - the gags Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Canadian is making a welcome return to the Fringe after a few years away and the break has served him well, as he's been doing a bit of travelling, and it was an incident when he flew to Indonesia that provides the starting point - and beautifully conceived climax - to No Lands Man. Wool clearly has one of those faces that border guards are attracted to. Not in that way, but they often figure he's concealing drugs, and on this occasion he was given a strip search. A horrible experience for most of us, but comedy gold to a comic, or at least a comic with a vivid imagination.So he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It has been, we can safely agree, a truly terrible week. Art, culture, call it what you will, is unequal to the task of diagnosing a nation’s ills, let alone curing them. But on a night such as the inaugural Comedy Prom, it comes equipped with healing balm. This evening was maybe not perfect. There were wrinkles, little bits here and there that didn’t quite work. But the Saturday night that the BBC Proms gave over to the business of laughter could not have been more opportune. This is going to sound hokey, but comedy on this occasion brought its audience close to a state of grace. For which Read more ...
theartsdesk
Physically reduced he may have been, but his talents were as expansive as ever, and more than capable of holding a small room captivated with just voice and guitar. Whereas in recent years Leven has released a somewhat bewildering range of music under a variety of noms de plume, often mixing his tales of Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court cab drivers and damaged Dundonian bar-stool philosophers with ironically cheap and synthetic musical textures, on stage he was a far warmer proposition.His live act is as much about the yarns as the songs, and Leven offered up rambling reflections on the “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After 12 years in the business, Dana Alexander, an ebullient and instantly likeable presence on stage, is still the only black woman on the Canadian comedy circuit. Not that her ethnicity is Alexander's pre-occupation – it most definitely isn't – but it does play a part in her act.New Arrival deals with being an outsider, primarily as a Canadian now living in London, but clearly also as someone who has had similar experiences in North America. As she says, she started out in Alberta – "the Texas of Canada" - and gets great mileage out of her extended Jamaican/American/British family. The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imagine that Tim Burton, or some other great modern-day storyteller of your choice, knocks at your door and asks if he can come into your living room for an hour to tell some fantastical stories. You would get some beers in and friends around pronto, right? Well, the Lounge Room Confabulators, a duo from Australia who tell stories in the Burton style of weird and dark, do just that – turn up on your doorstep and then perform in your front room, your garden or your office, wherever you have space for 10 or more people.It starts with a rug called Keith, who is due respect, for he provides the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Margaret Cho, Assembly **** Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely not Waspish.Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Monster in the Hall, Traverse ****
David Greig's indie comedy musical, first performed at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre at the end of last year, is a bright and inventive four-hander about a 16-year-old girl struggling to keep everything together. Duck Macatarsney (Gemma McElhinny), who writes escapist stories in her room, cares for her biker dad, known as Duke, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At the beginning of the play Duke (Keith Macpherson) is struck blind.Duke was a Hell's Angel in his day, before Duck's mother died in a motorbike accident, but now stays at home, tinkering with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tim Minchin, the Australian minstrel comedian, is known by his catweazel hair, thickly kohled eyes and dazzlingly witty songs bashed out at a grand piano about, among other things, the debatable existence of the Almighty. Lately his repertoire of tricks has been expanding. He has toured his show with a full orchestra, he wrote the songs for the RSC's rapturously received stage adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda (which comes to the West End this autumn) and on Saturday he is hosting the first ever Comedy Prom. Resuming theartsdesk's series featuring the summer reading habits of significant Read more ...