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The Lost Disc review – tall tale of a great Glastonbury bootleg

October 15, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
Will Adamsdale shapeshifts to play a crooner, a troubadour and a country singer in an ambitious mockumentary show

‘Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician,” Kurt Vonnegut once said, and comedy isn’t short of examples, from Ricky Gervais playing as David Brent with Foregone Conclusion to Jack Black’s Tenacious D and the Mighty Boosh’s heavy Camden shtick.

For something more subtle, try The Lost Disc, in which mild-mannered Perrier award winner Will Adamsdale shapeshifts into Roger LeFevre (a folk troubadour), Tony Noel (a jazz crooner who sings Christmas songs year-round) and AP Williams (a country singer). In The Lost Disc, fictional former 6 Music DJ Stu Morecambe is on the hunt for an apocryphal bootleg of a performance by LeFevre, Noel and Williams at Glastonbury 1985.

The Lost Disc is essentially two shows in one, then – something which ultimately undermines its various delights. The bulk of it is devoted to the three musicians, with Adamsdale superb as he twists himself with minimal exertion into effectively mimicking Dylan and Donovan, then Tony Bennett and finally Johnny Cash. With each performer, we are sent down a backstory rabbit hole, partly for the sake of pure adventure but also to shore up the over-engineered narrative. The original songs – written by Adamsdale, Ed Gaughan and Chris Branch and performed on stage alongside the London Snorkelling Team – are mightily impressive and bring some warmth to this tall tale. And as well as Adamsdale’s discreet style of star quality, the supporting cast is excellent, notably the versatile Gaughan.

The Lost Disc is at Soho theatre, London, until 27 October.

Rob Brydon: I Am Standing Up review – clowning crooner’s homecoming gig

October 12, 2018TheGuardian

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Brydon beats a well-trodden path through crowd work, gags about middle-aged decline and pitch-perfect impressions

“Some people have said this show is more honest than funny,” Rob Brydon tells us at the start of this homecoming gig. Never was a less honest word spoken. Brydon is many things – several of them are on show this evening – but heart-on-sleeve isn’t one of them. Whether he’s playing the clown, crooner or chronicler of midlife indignity, it’s not to reveal anything significant about himself, but to amuse us. Paying tribute to his pal Ronnie Corbett, he recalls growing up in Port Talbot a devotee of 70s light entertainment. It’s a tradition into which this touring show fits as neatly as an imaginary ball into Eric Morecambe’s paper bag.

It’s part variety, part celebrity appearance and not much standup comedy. The first third is crowd-work, as Brydon garlands his audience with near-the-knuckle abuse about their dress sense and decrepitude. Comedy-wise, it doesn’t go much beyond that – but at least the usual barbs about crap local towns are distinguished here by Brydon’s first-hand knowledge. The central section finds the 53-year-old lamenting his bodily decline. He pisses weakly; he farts prodigiously. As does his sleeping wife: “I got out of the bed,” says Brydon, “I stood up, and I applauded!”

At Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, until 13 October.

Eleanor Morton: ‘I drank two litres of Irn Bru in 40 minutes and saw God’

October 12, 2018TheGuardian

The Scottish standup, writer, actor and member of comedy group Weirdos on the things that make her laugh the most

Maybe Key and Peele’s Cat Poster? I can’t think of a single one of their sketches I don’t laugh at.

Joanna Lumley: It’s All About Me review – Ab Fab gags and Trump tales

October 11, 2018TheGuardian

Birmingham Symphony Hall
The veteran comic’s enduring ability to captivate a crowd saves a best-of evening that occasionally descends into tedium

They’re a real pop-will-eat-itself phenomenon, these live shows by TV personalities. As with Griff Rhys Jones a few months back, so now with Joanna Lumley: a small-screen celeb taking to the stage to talk through clips of things we’ve already seen them do on TV (top-price tickets: £62.50). They seldom make for gripping live performance, and sometimes – tonight, for example – descend into tedious love-ins, as Lumley fields written questions (“Will you marry me?”, “Can I have a kiss?”) submitted by her crowd.

The entire second act is given over to these questions, mediated by Lumley’s sometime TV producer Clive Tulloh. You might think the Q&A format would occasion spontaneity on Lumley’s part. And so it does, to a very small degree. The rest, though, is contrivance, as the audience’s questions are corralled to fit around her precooked anecdotes and clips.

Joanna Lumley: It’s All About Me is touring until 11 November.

Griefcast’s Cariad Lloyd: ‘Laughter? It’s about survival. It’s about living’

October 10, 2018TheGuardian

After her standup success and podcast about death, the comic’s next step was obvious: starring in a cancer-ward romcom

It wasn’t, I assume, the toughest decision in the history of casting. Who you gonna call, Finborough theatre, to star in your new play about a comedian and improviser grieving her dead sister and tending to her dying mum? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (yup, that’s the title) could have been written for Cariad Lloyd: comic, improviser and creator of Griefcast, the award-winning podcast about death. Talk about typecasting. Getting to grips with the role of Karla was hard, says Lloyd, “because I had to keep reminding myself, OK, this is where she’s not me.”

In fact, the play is a 2016 off-Broadway success, whose writer, Halley Feiffer, is now working on a new Jim Carrey sitcom. Its maiden UK production coaxed Lloyd back to theatre after years in comedy, improv and, latterly, parenting. “I’d wanted to do a play again for ages,” she tells me over tea on the afternoon of Funny Thing’s opening night. “But initially, because of the baby” – her daughter is 22 months old – “I wanted to say no. Then I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s really funny. It was annoying, but the part was just really funny.”

A Funny Thing Happened… is at the Finborough theatre, London, until 27 October.

Aziz Ansari suggests ‘wokeness’ can go too far at surprise gig

October 8, 2018TheGuardian

The US comic is cynical about competitive virtue-signalling in a show that doesn’t directly respond to allegations against him but is full of friction

What happens to men accused of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era? Assuming their offences don’t incur legal sanction, how, if at all, might they be rehabilitated? How soon is too soon for a comeback – and what should it look like? One place that debate isn’t being staged is in Aziz Ansari’s new standup show, which made an unheralded visit to London’s Top Secret Comedy Club last night. Ansari doesn’t mention the babe.net article in January in which a woman he had dated accused the Master of None star of inappropriate behaviour, which he denied.

Some will say: why should he mention it? The Ansari accusations weren’t about workplace harassment, nor serial abuse. The details of the complaint against him seemed, to some, open to interpretation. Ansari wasn’t found guilty in the court of public opinion; at worst, it was a hung jury. In which context, why rake over the whole ugly and contentious experience in a comedy show? Ansari chooses not to do so – although those looking for clues to his feelings about it were given plenty to chew on at this work-in-progress UK outing for a set he’s recently been performing in the US.

Daliso Chaponda: ‘I got pickpocketed before a Chris Rock gig but still laughed like a maniac’

October 5, 2018TheGuardian

The Malawian standup and Britain’s Got Talent runner-up on the things that make him laugh the most

I went to Chris Rock’s Total Blackout tour. On the way, myself and comedian Tony Vino got into an altercation with some “youths” – one of whom pickpocketed me. I didn’t think anything could make me laugh after that, but a few minutes into his set I was laughing like a maniac.

Vulcan 7 review – the Young Ones meet again as old dinosaurs

October 5, 2018TheGuardian

Cambridge Arts theatre
Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer write and star in a Beckettian comedy about two past-it thesps making a sci-fi film on the edge of a volcano

Once they were The Young Ones; now they’re “a couple of old dinosaurs”. The tectonic plates have shifted and Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer are teetering on the edge of extinction. Vulcan 7, a new stage comedy written by and starring the erstwhile Vyvyan and Neil, and directed by Steve Marmion, is about two ageing actors stuck in their trailer on the slopes of an Icelandic volcano. A send-up of showbiz egos and a peek into the hollow heart of a life spent pretending to be someone else, it starts like a bad sitcom and ends like good Beckett.

The first half is all talk and dramatic stasis. We’re on the set of bargain-bucket sci-fi movie, Vulcan 7, starring old-school thesp Hugh Delavois (Planer) as a butler, and loose cannon Gary Savage (Edmondson) in an undignified costume as an alien insectoid. The pair have previous: they went to Rada together and shared girlfriends before their careers diverged: for Gary, movie stardom and self-destruction; for Hugh, character parts, bourgeois life and an MBE.

Nish Kumar review – apoplectic state-of-the-nation standup

October 4, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The Mash Report host unleashes a high-octane, self-mocking political show brimming with exasperation and anger

You can tell it’s been two years since Nish Kumar’s last live show – as long as it’s possible, surely, for this most vociferous of comics to keep a lid on things. The first 10 minutes of It’s in Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves are like a dam bursting: he’s got so much to say about the state of our benighted nation, so many apoplectic opinions to advance. It’s a cracking opening, as the Mash Report man hurls himself at the government’s handling of Brexit (“an Ocean’s Eleven of rank incompetence”), the revelation that makes sense of Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the high British Asian vote to leave the EU.

On that latter topic, members of his own family aren’t spared, and if the punchlines here are more playground abuse than Shavian wit – well, Kumar’s bad temper is part of the joke. Most of the gig is delivered at a high pitch of dismay: we’re never far from the next screech of exasperation, at “random” airport bag checks on brown people, or at the post-Office career of Ricky Gervais.

At Soho theatre, London until 4 October. Then touring until March.