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Fringe 2005 Reviews (53)
Freestyle Love Supreme
By Anthony Veneziale
Assembly Rooms
*****
These guys are great. Freestyle Love Supreme is an improvisational
hip hop show presented by six young New Yorkers with minds like the
sharpest of rapiers.
Their skill is in taking abstract words and concepts and instantly
turning them into freestyle raps that sparkle with wit.
They really work as a team. MC is the fresh-faced Two-Touch who also
devised the concept. He and Lin-Man are the rappers supreme. C-Jack
has the sweet, melodic voice and Shockwave makes a great squirrel with
his human percussion skills.
Add in two musicians and you have a close-knit team of six talented
performers who dig each other out and keep things flowing.
Part of the fun is like that of watching a magician and working out
how they do it. They do work to a number of formulae but even when you
see through the odd trick, you can forgive them for their charm and
verbal dexterity.
Mixing a movie starlet, a singer-songwriter and a year sounds like
a recipe for disaster. For Freestyle Love Supreme it is an opportunity
to excel. Even audience volunteer, Jane from Wales whose day was embarrassingly
(she was) unexciting didn't faze the boys.
There cannot be too many comedy shows of this quality in Edinburgh.
Apart from one overly-long set that gives the crew a break, the mix
of hip hop and laughs is close to perfect. Go and see it.
Philip Fisher
The Mystery of Chung Ling
Soo
By Adam Koplan and Amy Boyce
C Chambers Street
****
The Mystery of Chung Ling Soo is the latest work to reach Edinburgh
after development at 78th Street Lab. It therefore comes with a great
pedigree, as they have already won a couple of Fringe Firsts in recent
years.
Their speciality lies in taking highly unlikely true stories and developing
them into slickly produced stage dramas.
In the first couple of decades of the last century, Vaudeville loved
its magicians and the highly mysterious proved most popular. William
Robinson, a contemporary of Harry Houdini, was pretty good with card
tricks and not much more and his act was growing stale.
His solution was to bring a new act, in employing the Celestial Chinaman
Chung Ling Soo, whose speciality was an illusion called Defying the
Bullets.
This worked a treat and toured the world. Nobody realised that Chung
Ling Soo was not all that he seemed. The true story only emerged after
one of the rifles aimed at the magician misfired and killed him.
The joy of The Mystery of Chung Ling Soo is in the production
values. The Flying Carpet Theatre Company take us back almost 100 years
to a world long gone. Featuring live music on keyboards and percussion
from Michael McQuilken, they recreate the act beautifully and maintain
suspense, as all of the magician's secrets are slowly revealed.
Philip Fisher
Rhod Gilbert's 1984
Pleasance Courtyard
***
Rhod Gilbert is a Welsh stand-up comedian who hardly swears and whose
sexual references are of the sniggering schoolboy variety. How can he
be a success in his chosen career?
In fact, Gilbert's funniest lines are presented before he gets onto
the annus horribilis that he shares with George Orwell's Winston
Smith. The handle from a roller suitcase, complete with airline label
tells its own tale. Our man elaborates on this with black wit.
The comedian perches on a stool looking like an ordinary Welsh bloke
whom you might fall over in any bar. His main routine details the traumas
that hit the Gilbert family in Llanbobl, a town that he admits doesn't
exist.
Mum has fun with the milkman and fishmonger, granny loses her arms
in a knitting accident early in the year and her life in a footballing
one a few months later. Sis walks out after her pet ferret Roger is
treated cruelly and it is hardly likely that bereaved Grandad will make
it through this kind of bad year.
All of this is delivered by the hoarse-voiced comedian in a loud but
laid back manner, involving members of the audience but never aggressively.
It is witty enough to hold the attention and get laughs but rarely reaches
the heights that would justify the many awards that Gilbert has already
received as he has toured the world.
There is a finale comprising a kind of brief home video epilogue that
is funny enough to have been considerably extended.
Philip Fisher
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