Fringe Music
Michelle Shocked
New Town Theatre
FOUR STARS
Barbara Morrison: I Wanna Be Loved
The Outhouse
FOUR STARS
Etherwave: Adventures with the Theremin
Sweet Grassmarket
THREE STARS
EVEN by the standards of the Fringe, where intimate performance spaces are quite commonplace, the first nights of Michelle Shocked’s New Town Theatre residency have a collectors’ item quality, with the audience joining her onstage and the Texan troubadour singing and playing guitar acoustically. If you liked her best known song, Anchorage, and fancy hearing it as if Shocked is sharing it with you in your kitchen, then get along before the word gets out and the PA gets turned on.
Anchorage, with its informal updates on the various characters therein, was the bonus track on Saturday. Over twenty-four nights Shocked is rotating her Mercury trilogy of albums and this was Arkansas Traveler’s turn, many of its songs drawing directly on Shocked’s musical roots and influences. Hold Me Back picks up the story of Frankie and Johnny and Prodigal Daughter revises Cotton Eyed Joe, and the background to Shocked taking poetic licence becomes an integral, winning element of their performance.
She turned the audience into her personal choir with her girls and boys singalong parts, made sure the youngsters accompanying their parents didn’t feel left out of the adult’s fun and latterly magicked up a fiddler, who played from the auditorium on the songs based on traditional reels. Even in an age when stars interact with fans through social media, this felt like a down-home, down to earth, direct, open, and friendly meeting with an honest and occasionally indiscreet (Billy Bragg, how could you?) personality.
Runs ends August 28.
YPSILANTI, Michigan’s greatest gift to the blues and jazz world, Barbara Morrison is so convincing in portraying the queen of the blues, Dinah Washington that sometimes you have to remind yourself that it’s not her own seventh husband she’s talking about or her own gun she pulled on an untrustworthy agent.
Morrison sings as herself, using lived-in and elastically expressed songs from Washington’s eventful and majorly successful career to thread “The Queen’s” story together from church choir to stardom through hardship, mischief, husbands (they all “Had. To. Go”), road tales, and helpful professional advice from jazz and blues masters including Lionel Hampton and Joe Williams.
With a deferential band comprising local players Jimmy Taylor (bass), Bobby Stewart (drums), Phil Adams (guitar), and Tom Finlay (keyboard), Morrison delivered Come Rain or Come Shine with mostly the latter, had everyone on their feet for Every Day I Have the Blues and localised Ain’t Nobody’s Business with some, hopefully unfulfilled, promises of misbehaviour. A fun and very real session with a singer who quickly and emphatically got the show’s titular wish.
Run ends August 10.
SIMON Cowell described Ms Hypnotique’s Theremin playing as the worst thing he’d ever heard. Quite a statement from the great talent spotter, but as the musical interludes in Etherwave show, the first electronic instrument and perfect pitch aren’t an easy match. What Etherwave does have going for it is Ms Hypnotique’s research, some of which might have you Googling to find out how often your leg has been pulled, and a high entertainment factor as she charts the instrument’s history, celebrates its greatest exponents and their possible KGB connections, hooks up with fellow players around the world, and tests the audience’s listening skills – with prizes.
Run ends August 14.
Rob Adams
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here