Comedy Reviews
Edinburgh Fringe: The Monster in the Hall/ Joel Dommett/ Katherine RyanMonday, 08 August 2011![]()
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. Read more... |
Sam Simmons, Soho TheatreSunday, 24 July 2011![]()
The award-winning Australian comedian Sam Simmons is shuffling around in a pair of bread loaves. He's wearing them like slippers and trying to take bites out of them at the same time. Indeed, his tremendously silly show, Fail, is essentially a shambles. This is the overarching joke: it's his absurd non-sequiturs and his tongue-in-cheek, shamateur performance style that reduce his audience to spasms of laughter. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Latitude Festival: Smorgasbord in SuffolkTuesday, 19 July 2011![]()
Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So... Read more... |
Jeff Garlin, Soho TheatreFriday, 24 June 2011![]()
It must be the beautiful British weather that has attracted a bunch of American comics to UK shores recently. Just before Las Vegas legend Rita Rudner starts a short season at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and hot on the heels of his Curb Your Enthusiasm sometime colleague Jerry Seinfeld (who recently did one night at the O2 in Greenwich and of whom more later)... Read more... |
The Pajama Men, Soho TheatreTuesday, 21 June 2011![]()
The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe featured a likeable comic duo in pajamas with imaginations as elastic as their faces. The titular garment – spelt the American way after their nationality – suggested both excitable role-play after lights out and those internally logical narratives we visit in our sleep. Their enacted tales of ghouls and freaks, nutters and natterers made only a perfunctionary effort to cohere, but audiences collapsed with laughter and the Pajama Men have now twice taken up... Read more... |
The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville TheatreMonday, 20 June 2011![]()
The Flying Karamazov Brothers give a new meaning to the word “practised”. Their first stage show in 1981 was called Juggling and Cheap Theatrics - a smart title that they could have kept for the show they bring to London’s West End, largely made of routines that this celebrated US comedy-juggling act have been doing for decades. It’s weird to see in YouTubes of their early performances some of the material I watched last night at the Vaudeville. Still, the fact is those old... Read more... |
Derren Brown: Svengali, Shaftesbury TheatreMonday, 13 June 2011![]()
Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and that there is a rational explanation for everything he does in his two and a half hours on stage, and indeed describes himself as “Illusionist, mentalist and sceptic” - I imagine emphasis is on the sceptic. Read more... |
Jerry Seinfeld, O2 ArenaSaturday, 04 June 2011![]()
Jerry Seinfeld, acclaimed New York stand-up and star of the eponymous American sitcom co-created with Larry David, last performed in the UK 13 years ago. He’s currently doing a brief European tour and, while keen fans were quick to snap up tickets at the O2 in London, there were noticeably bare areas in the vast arena last night. Lots of British comics have managed to sell out the O2 (some repeatedly), but those unsold seats should come as no surprise; ticket prices started at £75 and went... Read more... |
John Cleese, TouringFriday, 13 May 2011![]()
Even if you are not of an age to have watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers when they were first broadcast by the BBC, you will have heard of John Cleese. And if you are remotely a fan of comedy, you will hold Cleese in high regard as he is a writer, performer and actor of great talent, and this show, an overview of his life and career, proves it beyond argument. Read more... |
Nina Conti, Menier Chocolate FactoryWednesday, 11 May 2011![]()
You don’t see much ventriloquism these days. It’s a comedy form mostly associated with variety and Victorian music hall - although it goes back at least to the Greeks - and gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. I know several people who can’t watch Michael Redgrave’s chilling performance as the unbalanced ventriloquist Maxwell Frere, who believes his dummy is alive, in the 1945 Ealing horror film Dead of Night. And it’s Psych 1.01 to appreciate there may be some serious... Read more... |
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