Mad as a Hatter

The Carroll Myth
Venue: Sweet Grassmarket
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 20 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 stars



There can scarcely be anyone whose childhood was untouched by Alice in Wonderland, the beloved and enduring Victorian creation of mathematician Charles Dodgson under his pen-name Lewis Carroll and modelled in part on the inquisitive mind of the daughter of his college Dean, Henry Liddell.

Academics and psychologists have mined the text and contemporary diaries for rival theories about Carroll’s fixation with Alice, and analysed his own mind conflicted between his career as a logician and vivid imaginings of the storybook characters with which he entertained her.

Superbly realised in Nathan Shreeve’s original and dynamic script, the gentle Dodgson is besieged by the characters from the story. How they overlap with the personalities in his real life and unravel his mind is entirely plausible in Joshua Ogle’s meticulously graduated performance: Alice’s overbearing mother becomes the Red Queen, a pair of quarrelsome gardeners in the Liddell household inform Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The sinister atmospherics of the production are brilliantly nuanced through original music and the sinuous linkages of the Cheshire Cat, played by an enthralling trio of physical actors. Fine characterisations too in the performances of Charlie Rendell as Liddell and the realistically mad Hatter, and a gorgeously creepy and coquettish Sarah-Miles-in-the-making Alice from Eleri Jones, the very embodiment of ‘Contrariwise’.

- Johnny Fox

The Granny Awards

ED FRINGE 2011: Alzheimer’s The Musical : A Night to Remember
Gilded Ballroom Teviot
Written by : Maureen Sherlock

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 3.5 stars



What did I go and see yesterday? Is this Glasgow? Are you my sister? Have I had my pills?

Perhaps Alzheimer’s is setting in already because I know from the damp patch in my pants I laughed a lot yesterday afternoon, but can’t fully recall what at.

Three Australian actresses portray elderly ladies in the ‘Jurassic Park’ retirement home in Melbourne. The slight joke gives a clue to what’s to come: lots of obvious gags about incontinence, failing eyesight, forgotten sex, deafness and hip replacements … and it’s true some of the jokes are as whiskered as the residents and the dialogue needs the over-repeated “dear” plucking from it like white hairs on the old girls’ chins, but an almost sell-out crowd rocked with laughter.

Sharpened up with a bit more topicality, this could become a regular Fringe favourite.

There are some hilarious moments, the best of which is the sex education balloon routine. A sketch about grandma giving her granddaughter a Mickey Mouse watch is both funny and touching, but the best gag of the afternoon comes in the ballroom dancing class and you’ll certainly remember that.

Off Broadway. Way Off.

Broadway Swings
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 19 August 2011
WOS Rating: 2 stars




Interviewed for Edinburgh-Festivals.com, former Fest director Paul Gudgin trails his big band show by identifying his favourite number as "a fantastic version of 'Don't Rain On My Parade' from Sweet Charity".

That he didn’t appear to know it comes from Funny Girl seemed exemplary of the many cock-ups in this thrown-together one-night stand.

The A4-photocopied “Razz Big Band” labels stuck onto the music stands suggests a random assemblage of session musos most of whom peer closely at the dots throughout rather than relaxing into confident jazz improvisations. And there were some cataclysmic mistakes, particularly among the brass section whose multiple casualties littered the car-crash near the end of a West Side Story medley.

The chorus of what looked like local amateurs was under-rehearsed and tragically choreographed, although several of them sang extremely well in the Hairspray finale.

The unannounced soloists varied from a confident and polished delivery of “Mack the Knife” to two musically excellent divas, one tall and blonde and one Bassey statuesque who sang brilliantly but might just take a closer look at the lyrics, which caused some mistiming issues in Roxie’s big number from Chicago and, unforgiveably, "Over the Rainbow".

- Johnny Fox

Sweat, Sweat, Sweating on Heaven's Door

ED FRINGE 2011: Liberace: Live in Heaven
Assembly George Square

Written and directed by: Julian Woolford
Musical Director: Allan Rogers
Lighting Design: Martin Nicholas

The Public Reviews Rating: 4.0 Stars

Reviewer: Johnny Fox



This is a clever construct: at the pearly gates, the “world’s highest paid entertainer” meets his inquisitors in St Peter (voiced by Stephen Fry) and God (Victoria Wood – “I made the world in six days and on the seventh I baked a fruit cake”) before an audience of angels decides his ultimate destination.

Smartly realised in Julian Woolford’s well-researched script, the casting of seventies’ talent show pianist Bobby Crush is a stroke of genius. ‘Stroke’ may be uncomfortably close to the truth: Crush looks terrific as Liberace, having morphed from sweet-faced Opportunity Knocks winner to convincingly sweating grotesque, but you might worry for his own cholesterol count.

His acting, though, has only two settings: accurately gargling his vowels to ape Lee’s camp delivery, and ‘serious’ which he deploys for the reflective passages about childhood and sexual confessions,. The wig and makeup transform him perfectly into the character, but when he copies Liberace’s trademark smile, his eyes disappear and some engagement with the audience is lost.

His competence at the keyboard is unrivalled, and the way in which he adopts Liberace’s style of playing is entirely authentic. However, the anachronistic references to Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson don’t really work and the excessive reverb on the sound desk and the imbalance between piano and backing track need to be urgently addressed.

'Shooting' Stars

Pretty Little Panic
Venue: Pleasance Dome
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 20 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 Stars



The only reason I acceded to my headmaster’s arm-twisting to attempt the Cambridge entrance exam was that I might have stood a chance of getting into the Footlights. Over its many years, the Footlights have developed a well-earned rep as a crucible of original and brilliant comedic talent from Monty Python via Fry and Laurie to The Inbetweeners - and now most latterly incarnated in the class of 2011’s Edinburgh offering Pretty Little Panic.

The barrel-vaulted auditorium and black set offer no clues to the content. Four guys in white shirts and black jeans with big shoes to fill. No pressure, then.

The genius of Pretty Little Panic is the way in which the last line of a sketch sparks the first of the next, and the pace never drops. This would be individous if all you remembered was the technique, but Chain Gang, Liberal Parents, and the Truth Spoon sketches ensure you’ll carry away much more from this tight and almost impeccably performed show.

It’s always fun to guess which of a Footlights cast could have a stage career beyond Uni: Adam Lawrence’s rubber-legged physicality might make him a good cover for Lee Evans, but it’s Ben Ashenden who stands out with potential for a combined stand-up, acting and car insurance career in the mould of Chris Addison.

There’s a long tradition of Edinburgh Fringe reviewers spunking stars up the wall in order to be bylined on the posters – but what the hell, this is so far beyond four that as long as you spell my name right, it’s a definite five.


- Johnny Fox

Swann Upmanship

ED FRINGE 2011: Flanders and Swann – Pleasance Courtyard
Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 4.5 stars



Michael Flanders and Donald Swann were songwriters and cabaret artistes who debuted in the 1950s and attracted the same kind of polite following as Joyce Grenfell for whom they also wrote some material.

As a sort of Kit and the Widow of the post-war parlour song, their pairing is almost perfect: Tim FitzHigham is a patrician cross between Richard Stilgoe and Boris Johnson and expertly mimics Flanders’ booming baritone, and Duncan Walsh-Atkins neatly pins Swann’s diffidence masking exceptional brilliance on the keyboard.

I wrote in my notes that this was a “60+” audience, meaning that numerically they nearly filled the seats, but it’s pretty much a demographic too.

Joyce Grenfell once wrote that her wartime audiences loved nothing more than to sing ‘old songs together, very slowly’ and when FitzHigham embarks on the bestiary of animal numbers including “The Elephant” “The Hippopotamus” and “I’m A Gnu” the audience joins in and the whiff of the twilight home is palpable.

His vocal energy is uncontainable, he punctuates many songs by leaping into the air at the start of the chorus but the uniqueness of Flanders and Swann was that they were both chair-bound: Swann behind his keyboard and Flanders with polio. I don’t think the show would be diminished if he tried the act in a wheelchair.

The highpoint of their continually delightful absurdity is when FitzHigham strips the tubular steel music stand of its cover, inserts hosepipe and funnel and plays the Rondo from Mozart’s Horn Concerto No 4 in E-flat Major during which he turns an acute shade of puce not often seen outside a Zandra Rhodes wallpaper book. Inspired.

Reich on Target

Hitler! The Musical
Venue: Gryphon Venues at the Point Hotel
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 18 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 stars



This is the show which might as easily have been titled Fringetime for Hitler: if only Max Biyalistock had thought to do it with an all-female cast.

Apart from one guy who actually plays Hitler’s mum, it’s an all-girl band who deliver this ‘gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden’ and suggest his conquest of Europe was a secondary career choice after failing to get into art school.

The songs raid every musical theatre genre including the obligatory-in-Edinburgh-student-show rap, but it’s all done to such a high standard that the fact that the parodies are driven home with the firmness of the inflatable hammer that constantly whacks the Jewish girl in the show’s best running gag, is as happily disregarded by the audience as any pretence at political correctness.

The singing’s great and the movement as sharply coordinated as you’d expect from Trinity Laban students, and the Third Reich rises and falls in a wildly anachronistic and irreverent hour.

It’s a four star show, but I’m adding a special sew-on yellow one for Rachel the token Jew who carries the joke right through to the last line.

- Johnny Fox

No Music? Tell Me It's Not True ...

Blood Brothers
Venue: C venues - C too
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 16 August 2011
WOS Rating: 4 Stars



Because the musical’s been a fixture in the West End for over 25 years, initially starring Barbara Dickson but subsequently sheltering any number of pop retirees including Spice Girl Mel C, most of the Nolan Sisters and X-Factor’s Niki Evans, it’s interesting to remember that Blood Brothers started life as a school play written by Willy Russell for Fazakerley Comprehensive in 1981.

Stripped of its music, you might wonder what’s left and how the pathos of a pair of separated twins who later meet as friends across a Liverpudlian class divide will play out unsupported by the anthemic score.

Surprisingly well, in the Lincoln student production.

The central character of cleaner Mrs Johnstone and her boss Mrs Lyons, although well-acted, become secondary to the development of their sons whose performances are totally convincing, particularly the gradual transition of ‘posh’ Edward from awkward schoolboy to uncomprehending businessman. It’s a characterisation rich in detail and both he and the ‘street’ brother Mickey strive successfully to keep Russell’s crude polemical view of class difference within the bounds of realism.

The streets of Liverpool are well-realised through simple props like dustbins, ladders and an old door, and the background is provided by a trio of wryly watchful urchins whose attentive expressions and subtle childlike reactions are a model for all ensemble actors.

Cast lists were unavailable but high praise also for the actress playing Linda, the best-friend/girlfriend who inherits the lonely burden of disenfranchised motherhood on a tough estate.

- Johnny Fox

Shite Charity

Sweet Charity by 'Northern Theatre Company' (actually a random amateur bunch from Hull)
Venue: C venues - C
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 15 August 2011
WOS Rating: 1 star (but only because 0 stars isn't permissible)



The idea that the Neil Simon-scripted 60's musical and Shirley MacLaine vehicle in which taxi dancer Charity Hope Valentine’s cheerful optimism survives all misfortunes should be transposed to a gay bar and bath-house on the Lower East Side is intriguing.

Realistically, that’s the only good thing about this show.

The opening “Big Spender” is set in a convincingly dirty urinal and features drag queens changing into leather for a fetish night, but it’s quickly apparent that these performers don’t have a singing or acting bone in their bodies and what’s left is an embarrassing hour during which the audience is largely agape at the awfulness of the entire project.

Cast and credits were unavailable, but the standard is universally dire, none more so than Charity’s dashing film-star Latin lover, played here as a lardy clod whose hair overhangs his expressionless face, or his two best friends who collectively crucify “Dream Your Dream” at least twice during the evening.

The cast are not helped by the staging (the urinals remain in view throughout), the accompaniment wherein Cy Coleman‘s glorious tunes are played inaccurately and without regard to variation of tempo or dynamics on a wheezingly emphysemic synthesizer, or by choreography so predictably conceived and inexpertly performed you have to watch it through your fingers.

There is nudity and simulated sex but tastelessly inappropriate and flabbily acted such that they lend new meaning to the American phrase ‘bad ass’.

Still fresh after 40 years

Review of FRESHER THE MUSICAL
at Edinburgh Fringe

Music and Lyrics: Mark Aspinall
Director: Guy Unsworth
Musical Director: Tom Curran

The Public Reviews Rating: 3.5 stars



It’s refreshing to see how Fresher’s Week hasn’t changed over the years. The insecurities over how to fit in, find your feet, seem cool and get laid could as easily have been set in the History Man era as today. Five students arrive in their allocated shared flat and through a series of drinking games and party nights discover, and expose, each other’s frailties.

The cast of young professionals and drama students are excellent, but the characters thinly drawn: the lads are variously post-Inbetweeners nerdish, nebbish or c*ntstruck and the girls too baldly contrasted pretentious Sloane and timid virgin. Whilst each actor inhabits the stereotype convincingly and with tremendous vocal ability, only Grace Eccleson‘s performance as Hayley finds emotional warmth and credibility.

As a project, Fresher The Musical has become a vigorously extended franchise with multiple productions and actively promoted performing rights. Like almost all novice musicals, its influences derive exclusively from ‘Rent’ and whilst the sub-Jonathan Larson pop-rock score is enjoyable within the theatre, the musical direction is good and the lyrics are sharp, there isn’t a take-away song or one you could recall even an hour later.

The cast sing enthusiastically “There’s More To Me Than This”, except there isn’t.

The obvious plot is monothematic and if the show’s designed to stretch beyond an Edinburgh hour might improve if the songs were harnessed to a more multi-dimensional script along the lines of Dean Craig’s tight first-year sitcom Off The Hook or the more surreal Campus devised by the Smack The Pony team.

They used to say about The Mousetrap that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t brilliant because there were enough new theatregoers born each day to keep it going for ever. With the Government’s aim for 50% of 18-year olds to get a student loan, maybe the same applies to Fresher.


Review written for The Public Reviews

Moderately Unbearable

Review of THE UNBEARABLE SH*TENESS OF BEING
at Edinburgh Fringe
Whatsonstage rating: 2 stars



Whilst deserving some sort of award for the most imaginative Fringe title, the show doesn’t live up to expectations. Whilst it isn’t “quite” unbearable and it isn’t “quite” shite, it came close enough for some punters to leave part-way through which is pretty condemnatory for a 35-minute piece.

Performed almost entirely by one lightly perspiring man in a boiler suit with interactive video, poetry reading, and dialogue rich in non-sequiturs – at one point he says, "if I were to explain this for 47 squllion years, you wouldn’t understand it" – and most of the audience nodded assent.

Despite the opacity of the concept, there are songs, poems and a determined rap about President Mitterrand, but your engagement is not helped by Roberts’ awkward microphone technique or the fact he reads eyes-down from the script, although I did like the ironic reworking of the Grimm's fairy tale as The Elves and the Psychotherapist.

Because of the disjunct of mashed ideas, you may come out of it with a smile raised or a memory jogged, but that feels like a too random result.

This review written for Whatsonstage.com

Into Edinburgh's Woods

Review of INTO THE WOODS at Edinburgh Fringe
TPR score: 4.0 stars



If ever a musical were designed to set traps for amateurs, it’s ‘Into The Woods’. The deceptively accessible ‘pantomime’ themes of Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood disguise Sondheim’s disjunctive and difficult score full of pitfalls for the musically unwary.

Opera di Nepotist stands out for its bravery: formed in 2009 to produce Sweeney Todd, the company actively embraces people without theatre experience or ability to read music which makes its well-judged and wholly engaging production of Into the Woods all the more triumphant.

As ROH Covent Garden proved in a 2007 Linbury studio version, ‘Woods’ shrinks well to a chamber format if the production values, colourful costumes and well-crafted props are of an exceptionally high standard as they are here. Copyright restrictions mean it couldn’t be trimmed to an Edinburgh-friendly hour, but even at 2 hours 20 with no interval it kept all the audience (except one small-bladdered seven-year-old) gripped throughout.

Some of the ‘one midight gone’ routines could be taken at a faster pace, but the five-piece band drove through the score at a lick, with some exceptionally well-rendered trumpet and string work.

Cast and credits were not available, but the stand-out voices belonged to Cinderella and her Prince, and good characterisations also from the Wolf/Prince/Steward, the Witch and the Baker’s Wife – but the most engaging single performance was Jack (of Beanstalk fame) who seemed best to capture both the spirit and the mockery of the pantomime format as well as the moral dilemmas explored through his character. Topically, when he raids the giant’s home for money, a harp and a fowl that lays golden eggs: is that the action of a boyish hero to support his family and friends, or looting?

This review written for The Public Reviews

'Card' Tricks

Review of THE CARD at Edinburgh Fringe
Whatsonstage.com rating: 3 stars



Forty-year old ‘forgotten’ musicals are tough to revive but the Keith Waterhouse/Willis Hall script and Tony Hatch score come up fresh and alive in Norfolk Youth Theatre’s enterprising and imaginative production of The Card.

With the luxury of a 25-strong unafraid and well-focused cast and a fine saxophone-led band, it tells the story of Denry Machin, an ambitious youngster in the mould of Waterhouse’s own Billy Liar who rises to fame and fortune in his small Potteries town through wily charm and steely determination.

Fraser Davidson makes Denry’s journey a confident arc of discovery from schoolboy to prosperous businessman, and carries the songs with a well-supported light tenor and naturalistic performance. Edward Bartram is every bit as promising as his best mate Parsloe, Jess Davidson pulls off the complex role of machinating Ruth Earp with class, and Charley Nicol shows great comic potential as Denry’s washerwoman mother whose sardonic commentary punctuates most of the scenes.

Although amateur, all the voices are free from the karaoke desperation of teenage singers and have been well-coached in musical theatre delivery by director Adrian Connell. In the ensemble numbers the sound is strong and well-blended, and the diction excellent. The many scene changes are slickly accomplished and the show moves at a great pace.

There are two versions of this musical, and whereas this one benefits from some sharpened lyrics from Betty Blue Eyes’ Anthony Drewe, the music’s a touch repetitive and the best songs from the original have been excised. That said, this production is a credit to the company and further consolidates their Edinburgh reputation.

This review written for Whatsonstage.com

Murder Will Out

Ed Fringe 2010: Girl, Constantly F*****g Interrupted
Writer/performer: Celia Peachey
Director: Tim Stubbs Hughes
The Public Reviews Rating: 2 stars

Great title, rubbish play.

I was about to launch into a diatribe against this piece – a sketchy, tentative overlong rummage around the physical and mental attic of the solo character Faith’s brain as she retreats from her murdered mother’s funeral to debate her mental state with the voices in her head. It sounds far-fetched, the voices aren’t well differentiated and it feels rather like an extended audition for accents and characterisations, but not good ones.

But journalistic ‘research’ sometimes leads you up a strange path and I came across the blog and website of the uncredited author and performer, Celia Peachey

Turns out the whole thing is true: her mother was indeed murdered – strangled with a dog-lead by her former lover who was himself a previously convicted killer, and her body hidden in a toilet. Here's the news item. Peachey is going through an angry and uncomfortable postrationalisation in a shroud of psychobabble about ‘the universe’ as well as battling alleged maladministration in the Essex Police, and her own recent grief.

So the faults are really in the marketing – if this weren’t scheduled as a comedy (it isn’t) but as a theatre piece, and if preferably the character(s) were played by someone other than Peachey herself, it might fare much better as a scarily well-informed drama about bereavement, mental imbalance and shock. Maybe bring it back to Edinburgh next year in a fresh treatment, and populate it with more of the living/deceased characters?

Meanwhile, I’d suggest a pre-performance voice-over to identify that this is a true story, as experienced by the actress because that’s not apparent from the performance.


written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com