Comedy Reviews
BBC Proms: Tim Minchin, Kit and the Widow, Beardyman, BBC Concert OrchestraSaturday, 13 August 2011
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. Read more...
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Edinburgh Fringe: Jackie Leven/ Jen Brister/ Doris Day Can F**k OffSaturday, 13 August 2011
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. Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Dana Alexander/ A Sentimental Journey/ Dog-Eared CollectiveThursday, 11 August 2011
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. Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Lounge Room Confabulators/ Andi Osho/ Matthew CrosbyWednesday, 10 August 2011
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... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Margaret Cho/ The Wheel/ Jessica ForteskewTuesday, 09 August 2011
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. Read more... |
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... |
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