Easily the worst show we've seen at the fringe. Garrett Millerick has trained an AI on his stand up. Can it replace him? Yes, but only in the sense that the AI is obnoxiously dull and Millerick is simply obnoxious. He insulted a kid who he'd called on to stage to help him. Not even in a jokey way, just being rude. His splenetic rants against religion and politics were beyond tired. The dating…
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I'm a sucker for anything Beatles related - and the fringe has no shortage of musicals, reinterpretations, and shameless cash-ins of the Fab Four. When Vincent Met John is an oddity in that it is a normal play, rather than a musical. It is also an oddity in being 90 minutes long rather than the standard fringe slot of no more than an hour. What if van Gogh and Lennon could have a conversation?…
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Sometimes at the Edinburgh Fringe, you take a punt on a random show because it's close by and you can't be bothered walking any further. Justina Seselskaite's set was round the corner and started in 7 ½ minutes - so we scurried into one of the less glamorous rooms of The Hilton, sat at the front (as is our wont), and wondered what on earth Lithuanian stand-up was like. It was sublime! There's a …
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Part of going to The Fringe is to expose yourself to new ideas, different art forms, and a range of artworks. Not everything needs to be a "zany" comedy about AI or a loving pastiche of that 1990s disaster movie you love. So I found myself sat in a Unitarian Church listening to a harpsichord and choral organ intertwined with a violin and cello while a soprano soared through Handel's greatest…
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🎼"Hamlet's Mum Has Got It Going On"🎵 There you go, now you've seen the show. That's about the height it reaches. Distil the tortured Prince of Denmark down to an hour and sprinkle in parody pop songs. It so nearly works. There are a few good chuckles and a smattering of clever lyrics but, even for an hour, it feels a bit flabby. The cast are game, with KT Ihnatyszyn giving a tour-de-force perfo…
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Afrofuturism is a hot topic in the world of sci-fi. This is the circus version of "For All Mankind" where the Zambia Space Academy (a 100% real thing) attempt to land on the moon and win the space race. Told in an acrobatic style, naturally. It is delightful to see classic acrobatics find a whole new audience - the children in the audience (and the adults) screamed with delight at the human…
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It is a brave children's show which starts with the song "I'm a smooth muthafukker"… This is sort of a live-action XKCD cartoon. A frenetic troupe of performers are decked with hand-drawn portraits and then… well, it is somewhere between a Sesame Street animation and the stick-figure kung-fu Flash animations of yesterday. The whole design is technically impressive. An endless stream of paper lit…
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Sex work is work, so we're told. There's no difference between picking up a night job stacking shelves and a night job jacking-off on screen. Right? Perhaps a couple need a little bit of extra cash and the siren song of OnlyFans is right there. Let's fire up the webcam and release ourselves from financial drudgery! Then reality hits. The script by Sean Stillmaker sounds like it was ripped…
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OMG! If you remember A/S/Ling your way through MSN to fill in your MySpace top 8, then you'll love this show. You're also over 30 and, therefore, old. Ew. The stage is littered with a Nokia 3310, Bliss Magazine, and Charlie Red. Katie (15/F/UK) talks us through the complexities of her nascent love life, what shag band colours mean, and which quotes sum up millennial angst. All the while…
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The terror of AI has come to comedy. There are a dozen shows this year about the threat that technology poses to the way we live, laugh, and love. In this case, AI stands for Austrian Imperialism and the fight is for Switzerland's independence. Well, sort of. It gets a bit lost in an endless stream of rambly diversions. There's a fine line between surrealist comedy and utter nonsense. If you…
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My mum's friend Rachel has a one-woman show on at the Fringe. As, apparently, the only orthodox Jew on the UK comedy circuit she has constructed a fully interactive Jewish Mother experience. Like several shows on the fringe, it relies on the audience writing questions on cards and the comedian riffing on them. Unlike other shows, Rachel has a huge stream of anecdotes and songs to weave into her…
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Fancy a quickie in Scotland's most haunted pub? Smut Slam is a (mildly) interactive performance where a handful of speakers get to tell their dirtiest stories. The audience fills in cards with their questions or confessions which may be read out. The format mostly works. There are different stories every night, so maybe we got a slightly uninspiring batch. Tales of sex parties, STIs, and broken …
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