Doctor Brown is the kind of act that makes audiences nervous: a rampant bearded clown who speaks largely gibberish and literally gets in your face, clambering over seats to sit in people’s laps, kiss them, even slap them. What kind of person would volunteer to spend an entire day trapped in an enclosed space with […]
I love a bit of Christeene. I flagged up her bravura flying visit to London in my round-up of cabaret highlights of 2013, and now she’s back in a big way, hitting Soho Theatre and Duckie’s Gay Shame ahead of a full Edinburgh run. This Q&A for Run-Riot is probably my favourite email interview that […]
Over the past year or two, some of the institutions that helped shape the London cabaret scene since the turn of the century have bitten the dust: companies like the Boom Boom Club and Eat Your Heart Out; residencies like the DE Experience at the RVT and the Wam Bam Club at the Café de […]
This week, the final episode of Drag Queens of London went out on London Live. The climax of the series – an eight-part documentary about drag performers in the capital today – was pegged to the finale of Trannyshack Academy, a talent contest held at iconic Soho cabaret bar Madame Jojo’s. This year’s winner was […]
The five years or so that I’ve spent covering cabaret and other kinds of alternative performance in a sustained way has been a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding experience. A vital part of that has been thinking about why I love these shows. A lot of it has to do (as I’ve recently written elsewhere) with […]
June has come which means one thing: Edinburgh time again! Sure, the Fringe itself doesn’t get underway till August but this year’s programme was launched last night and, for those involved in the fest, the next two months are basically spent bracing for the onslaught. In recent years, I’ve covered cabaret at the Fringe for […]
It’s been more than a month since I lasted posted on here. This ends now! Not that I’ve been idle. Over the past month or two, I’ve been keeping BURN‘s monthly residency at Hackney Attic going (that’s the platform for moving-image work by cabaret artists I started in 2010), and doing a one-off mini-BURN […]
Of course, everyone’s a critic these days. It used to be that only professionally snide, hoity-toity snobs got to do criticism – like Anton Ego, the restaurant critic in the animated movie Ratatouille. Look at him, with his arched eyebrow and nose made to look down, his skull-like typewriter and sharp-angled accoutrements, all set to […]
Last night was the first edition of Come With Me If You Want To Live, the quarterly cabaret show I’m putting on for Chelsea Theatre. I was really chuffed at how it all went: there was an incredible pop-up exhibition of David Hoyle’s paintings, with guided tour; cheeky vegetable sculptures by Rachel Porter; typically brilliant lip-synchery […]
As you’ll have noticed, there’s a good bit of anxiety around these days. I’ve got loads. You probably have too. I’m anxious about global things, like geopolitical instability and climate change; societal things, like employment prospects and dodgy urban planning; and personal things, like having a substandard body and shortchanging important relationships. Most people, […]
