Wow! A busy weekend of fringe shows with 2 for 1, preview and free tickets (ie cheap ones) being the primary reason for seeing 6 shows in 3 days:
Friday night was...
Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical (5.45pm Udderbelly)
Super tongue in cheek little farcical porn-inspired musical. Highly recommended though maybe not all more genteel viewers will get all the dirty references...
Saturday was...
Kendras 30th birthday picnic on the meadows which was much fun. Followed by...
Binari: The Spirit of the Beat (artist: Dulsori, 7pm Old College Quad)
This freebie to uni staff (a special deal for the first few performances to get the numbers up a bit I think) featured lots of enormously enthusiastic drumming from the group
Dulsori which was only slightly upstaged by the raver throwing some fabulous acid house shapes to the traditional Korean beat. I was very pleasantly suprised and Sarah and George, who had joined us for it, seemed to like it too.
Sunday was... insanely busy!!
From James Bond to Alexander - Jeremy Engler (12.10pm C Soco Urban Garden)
Offered film memories from a fairly youthful behind the scenes chap whose clearly more keen in front of the camera than playing with the technogeekery that generally earns him his living. It was a pretty good show though and with only 5 people sat in a rain-soaked tent whilst the rest of the venue was still under construction and a loud banjo show could be heard throughout it speaks wonders that we were all feeling warm and happy at the end of the hour...
Minor Spectacular - Plested and Brown (4.20pm Pleasance Dome (well one of the Potterrow Pleasance rooms)
Was a fantastic show which we only saw due to having decided to spend the afternoon using the free uni wireless in Potterrow whilst we waited out the next show - when we were flyered and offered a free ticket we hit very lucky indeed.
Plested and Brown are two expert performers and an extraordinarily versitile set (which Anna would love) brought loads of characters to life in fabulous fringe style. Get your tickets now!
The same enthusiasm can't be reserved for:
Tony! The Blair Musical (6.45pm C+1, Chambers Street)
This dire public schoolboy effort suffered inordinately from having been over-promoted (mainly catching the fancy of the media due to the presence of Ian Duncan Smith's son). Although a barber shop quartet of former tory leaders was genius, the rest of the show was dire. Giving us a 10 year retrospective of Blair is perhaps a challenging mission for an hour even if written by adults but these guys can't have been much over 20 and clearly had minimal interest in politics as they had timelines in a dire mess, no idea of how to handle the fact that they were performing in Scotland (easy jokes were missed on that one frankly) and just did not have the brains for the task. They had seen all the Bremner and Alastair Little parodies and that was all as it was like kids playing grown ups rather than genuine satire of any form. The score was passable (except for some oddly Gilbert and Sullivan numbers which didn't seem to fit in) and the singing ok but the one female star was fully atrocious and the boy playing Tony by far the weaker of the male leads. The whole effect was so much worse for being in an excruciatingly warm and crowded venue full of people who seemed to be genuinely loving it. I can only assume they are friends/family of the cast or very stupid tories. I am a hell of a long way from a Blair fan but dammit if I didn't feel he was worth a much more intelligent going over than this!
Next we were supposed to be seeing Rhona Cameron but some sort of freakish ticketing issue meant they were 8 people too many so we gladly accepted the Gilded Balloon's offer to exchange our tickets for another night (who would turn down 2for1 for full prive tickets on a better night?!) AND free tickets to that night's:
Karen Dunbar show (8.30pm, Gilded Balloon Teviot Debating Hall)
We went in with no expectations (although I did diss thoroughly the idiot who tried to edge her way into our 400+ person queue thinking it was for Jerry Sadowitz since what little I knew of
Dunbar marked her comedy pedigree as substantially more desirable than scatological Sadowitz) but were enormously pleasantly suprised. Next year we'll probably even pay for tickets to see Dunbar. Her comedy is genuinely very funny, well observed, refreshingly non-cruel (a particular bugbear of Heather's) and highly entertaining. If it was a little generic then at least she had the good taste to do it enormously well. Would be nice to see her be a tad more personal but I suspect I can see good financial and audience-related reasons for keeping it general or personal only in a childhood sorta way. Again, highly recommended.
And then... after 72 hours of running about fringe venues and cafes, eating crappy food and catching up on phonecalls as we waited for shows we collapsed, nursed Sunday's sunburn and thought of the horror of the fact that work started in 9 hours time...
And more than 9 hours later I'm just about making it through the day by being caffinated and sugared to the hilt. Roll on our next 4 fringe shows (Conversations with Edith Head - tonight 6.45 Hill Street Theatre; Rhona Cameron - Friday 8pm Gilded Balloon Teviot Dining Room; Eurobeat - Friday 9.45pm Pleasance Grand; Tony Blair the Musical - Sunday ??pm Gilded Balloon Tevit), whatever else pops up through the month (The Sound of Music Drag Show sounds good), the art gallery shows (we've done a good but weirdly curated Naked exhibition at the Portrait Gallery but have Picasso and Andy Warhol, David Batchelor: Unplugged to do plus a few others), a week+ of annual leave (am going to book more I think) and the true insanity of the film festival (my press pass confirmed and my retrospective tickets purchased I'm ready to go)...
Have a fab festival and do let me know what you've seen and what looks good!
