Fringe Music

Rob Adams

Triple Entendre: Love, Life and Other Stuff

C nova

FOUR STARS

Africanised

Bar Bados

THREE STARS

Starman

Assembly George Square

THREE STARS

WATCH out, chaps: at least one bloke in the audience gets a welcome he wasn’t expecting in Triple Entendre’s opening number. It starts with a look that would make a saint quiver with guilt and grows into a pointy, savage dismissal that might well have victims wondering what the hell actually happened during that alcohol-induced black-out.

And there’s more a bit later but, in between, the show moves along with the promised close harmony singing and tongue-in-cheek humour delivered with no little attention to detail and the energy drink of your choice-fuelled zest. It’s tempting to say that the name Triple Entendre denotes three young women singing and/or reciting single entendres, especially given the mirthful salty poem about frustration about half-way in, but that would risk being battered with their ukuleles, which feature in a song that lets the audience be as outrageous as the trio onstage.

It’s not all about sex, cheating boyfriends and unfortunate diseases, though. Their sharp wordplay is also directed at a very witty tour round the London Underground and a perhaps even funnier than intended skit on the jazz singer who couldn’t scat. Possibly not entirely harmless fun, with its potential for male trauma, but big fun nonetheless from a team whose writing and powers of observation, allied to genuine musical skill, might have them playing in much bigger rooms before long.

Runs to August 29

THERE is a suspicion that Africanised might be a euphemism and it becomes more pronounced with the inclusion of a Marvin Gaye medley that’s surely more about dancing the horizontal mambo than digging the musical rhythms of Soweto. The octet involved follows the example of Ladysmith Black Mambazo with persuasive, warm-voiced harmonies and well-choreographed movements, if without having the space available, on a quite confined stage, for the kind of high-stepping hijinks of the more famous group.

They also don’t exactly overstay their welcome. On the afternoon I caught them they were finished well within the promised hour and having revealed the secrets of how to Africanise a young lady, they suggested an interval in which to sell her a CD. With beer at £5 a pint on the premises, you might feel that, however good the music, singing and dancing, there are other deserving Fringe shows.

Runs to August 29

NEW York audiences apparently don’t care too much for the stories in between Sven Ratzke’s interpretations of David Bowie’s works in Starman. I think New Yorkers have a point. While Ratzke might have uncovered some insight into Bowie’s coked-out adventures in the Chelsea Hotel and Elizabeth Taylor’s boudoir (wasn’t that Michael Jackson?), his camp pseudo-recollections quickly pall and his affected disdain for other Fringe performers might carry more humorous weight if he didn’t do the same audience-bothering things that his targets do.

This is a pity because the songs are Starman’s real strength and Ratzke sings them with considerable style and authority, taking many of them down in tempo to funereal-going-on-glacial for added effect, as his accomplished band gives Space Oddity a suitably futuristic soundtrack and presents Is There Life on Mars as a searching space-jazz adventure. “We could be heroes,” Ratzke sings on a splendidly epic finale; and he could – if he cut out the blethers.

Runs to August 28