In a post yesterday, I suggested that the direct political engagement with which we still associate Brecht, Weill and Weimar cabaret in general is harder to find on the current cabaret scene, even though we live in a world of war, division, oppression, inequality and exploitation scarcely less outrageous than that of the interwar period. […]
“Come taste the wine, come hear the band!” As Ute Lemper reaches that line in that song (you know the one), she jerks a thumb over her shoulder to indicate ‘the band’ – though it’s a funny way of referring to the 60-odd classically trained musicians of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. But then Friday night’s […]
Well, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an internal organ… It’s been a slightly unusual Fringe. I had a week of great shows, lots of work and a little bit of play (less than I’d have liked thanks to those pesky London deadlines that I always promise myself will be cleared before the Fringe […]
With the Edinburgh Fringe just around the corner, there are plenty of performers out there bracing for the most intense experience of the year. And along with the pressures of having to create, perfect and publicise your show, there’s another looming challenge: what if you get a bad review? It’s something I’ve thought about as […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dear me, it’s been way too long since I was on here. I know it’s a cliché about blogs that you start enthusiastically and then let them tail off, and in that respect I seem to have become a cliché pretty quickly. My excuse for such negligence is that I’ve been doing lots of other […]
