Fringe Music & Cabaret

Voodoo Rooms

TWO STARS

Where Are the Villains Now

Spotlites

THREE STARS

We Can Make You Happy

Assembly George Square

THREE STARS

Rob Adams

Mel Frye Will Double Your Money is the sort of Fringe show that can develop into a cult, although not necessarily for positive reasons. The affable host welcomes his audience on arrival and opens with a song before getting down to the main business of drinking malt whisky from ever bigger glasses while fending off skype calls from his wife and his agent in New York.

Frye, who really does seem to have come direct from New York’s Slipper Room, has apparently been sent to Scotland to raise capital for a film by insulting the tight-fisted inhabitants. He doesn’t do it very well, either fundraising or insulting, and calls on his put-upon assistant, Betty Bombshell for more whisky and a strip tease.

Then he introduces his perfectly appalling, spectacularly expectorating special guest, a cross between Marty Feldman and Julio Iglesias’s worst impersonator, who is much better at the insults and might best be encountered with kagoule at the ready. You’re dying to see the show, I can tell. The blurb blesses Frye with nearly a century of performing and joke writing. He hides this experience well in both looks and content, although perhaps Americans really do do irony after all.

(runs to August 16)

David Robinson has a Beeb in his bonnet (thank you, Mel, the cheque’s in the post): the twenty-five-year-old singer and blues picker thinks the BBC can do better. He’ll get few arguments there and although some of his notions, such as the BBC harvesting Fringe acts for cheap programmes to replace repeats, might be a bit fanciful, he produces no end of passion and statistics to make his point.

His show is almost a two for the price one deal as his ultimately quite supportive polemic on the BBC is accompanied by and sometimes intersects the musical content, which is good. He’s a capable finger-picking and bottleneck style guitarist and his choice of songs, including Howlin’ Wolf’s classic blues Evil and Merle Haggard’s hard-bitten country standard I Can’t Be Myself When I’m With You, can be inspired. Following Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic with his own Hey, in which he voices inarticulate speech of the heart to a Baby Please Don’t Go groove, struck your reviewer as pretty clever. He might not be lining himself up for an appearance on Later with Jools but he deserves an audience.

(runs to August 31)

Alice and Harry are proof that if opposites don’t necessarily attract, then they can work well together on a Fringe show. In We Can Make You Happy, Alice plays Julie Andrews with bells on to Harry’s Clement Freud, a man so hang dog he gets all the laughs, and with bribes, poems, insults, compliments, singalongs, and stage invasions they get the audience onside.

It’s actually a rather well written, if also at times a mite cloying, musical of our times, with amusingly well done choreography, smart observations on social media’s functions and drawbacks, and cleverly witty songs that, with Harry’s deadpan delivery and their electronic backing, set the couple up as a kind of Pet Shop Boy and Girl. It also has the merit of talking, reciting and singing about noble gases and philosophers including Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche without making you feel that you’re watching University Challenge. An entertaining hour that will, unless you’re as terminally glum as Harry makes himself out to be, leave you smiling.

(runs to August 31)