Ruby Wax: I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was review – wandering towards wellness

Soho theatre, LondonThis one-woman play aims to dramatise Wax’s globe-trotting spiritual quest but gets sidetracked into anecdoteThis isn’t what she usually does, Ruby Wax confides in the preface to her show; this is a play. And so an expectation is se…

Continue Reading

Soho’s new home for cabaret is so slick it’s like countercultural cosplay | Brian Logan

The opening shows at London’s Underbelly Boulevard – Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett and Batsu! – are less edgy than you might expect, and more pricey, but there are some impressive turnsIt was one of the birthplaces of alternative comedy. Then it was a …

Continue Reading

Soho’s new home for cabaret is so slick it’s like countercultural cosplay | Brian Logan

The opening shows at London’s Underbelly Boulevard – Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett and Batsu! – are less edgy than you might expect, and more pricey, but there are some impressive turnsIt was one of the birthplaces of alternative comedy. Then it was a …

Continue Reading

Dancefloor disaster: Ayelen Parolin masters the choreography of comedy

The show must go on for the trio of hapless performers in Parolin’s new production Zonder, which finds the funny side in failureContemporary dance and comedy don’t exactly go hand in hand but Ayelen Parolin is a choreographer with funny bones. In her n…

Continue Reading

Iliza Shlesinger: ‘I’m thinking what many women are thinking – but saying it out loud’

The American comic on performing to a stripper party, the best heckle she’s had and why honest emotions are funnyHow did you get into comedy?I was always into watching funny shows – what was on TV that I could sneakily watch after my mom went to bed. I…

Continue Reading

Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine review – a frilly-bonneted comedy for today

Soho theatre, LondonIn this giddily inventive show, Minnitt plays a woman trying to bag a beau before her sentence to spinsterdom is declared‘I’m starting to get hysterical,” says Rosalie Minnitt’s Clementine, bearing down on her show’s denouement. “I …

Continue Reading

Fascinating Aïda review – caustic comments and filthiness 40 years on

Rose Theatre, Kingston upon ThamesFrom a killer song about cosmetic surgery to ditties on doppelgangers and dogging, Dillie Keane, Adèle Anderson and Liza Pulman are still going strongHow do you make your act feel new, 40 years on? Arguably, Fascinatin…

Continue Reading

Standup and be counted: Eddie Izzard and the comics who took politics by storm

Can the surreal comedy superstar parlay comedy chops into political power? Izzard certainly wouldn’t be the first standup to pivot from telling jokes to canvassing for votesFrom Eddie Izzard’s comedy we expect the incongruous. But was anything ever odd…

Continue Reading

To Have and to Hold review – fond family comedy from the writer of One Man, Two Guvnors

Hampstead theatre, LondonRichard Bean’s new play touches on ageing and alienation, care and family love, but focuses on making us laughYou might guess what kind of night you’re in for by To Have and to Hold’s fabulous opening: the first painstaking ent…

Continue Reading

Park your cynicism! Michael McIntyre is a super-relatable well-oiled joke machine

The everyman standup delivers substantial comic payloads by itemising the oddity of human behaviour. A successful formula his new tour continues to exploitAll the countries of the world have their own bread, runs one of Michael McIntyre’s routines in h…

Continue Reading