Camille O'Sullivan: The Dark Angel, Assembly @ Assembly Hall Star rating: ***
Camille O'Sullivan has developed an audience as well as a reputation for being a dependable Fringe turn.
Looking for someone who'll pull the cork from a bottle of red with her teeth during the second number or play with someone's hair?
You can almost set your watch by O'Sullivan delivering the same.
Her music has a similar reliability, with her comic rendition of In These Shoes, the pathos of Dillie Keane's Look Mummy (No Hands) daughter to mother rite of passage and growling covers of David Bowie and Nick Cave songs all in place.
The growl, however, is beginning to sound like a one-woman hen party with the timbre of a passing stretch limo, and she's in danger of lapsing into self-parody. Time, perhaps, to investigate a few more shades of darkness.
Ends August 31.
Dinosaur Planet, Medina & Negociants Star rating: ***
Norwich will never be the same again. As the landing site for MJ Hibbett's alien force in his remake of War of the Worlds, this pleasant East Anglian city becomes devastated by Buzz Lightyear-style dinosaurs.
And so begins an agreeably exhausting tale told with engagingly physical enthusiasm and driven by songs that in the soundtrack to a movie requiring football stadia for screenings will be sung by Axl Rose and Meatloaf with orchestral accompaniment.
Here, ditties such as The Battle of Peterbrough are sung my MJ himself to his own guitar strumming in a basement bar.
But like all good storytellers, Hibbett takes his audience on a journey.
In his fantasy, dinosaurs from outer space speak like pirates, drink rum and gang up with us earthlings to fight 300ft robots for our survival.
Nuts? You bet. But clever and entertaining with it.
Ends tomorrow.
Colours of the Night, Inlingua Edinburgh Star rating: ****
Nick Pynn seems doomed to be forever performing up several flights of stairs in a room that holds barely thirty people who will all go away wondering why Pynn isn't playing in a much bigger venue.
It's happening again as Pynn, a man for whom multi-tasking comes as second nature, conjures up multi-tracked-in-situ marvels where massed dulcimers hum palindromic folk dances, plays fiddle tunes to foot piano accompaniment that make their inspiration - toothache - feel almost desirable, and unleashes his home-made cocolele (a hybrid of coconut shell and ukulele fingerboard) on a work of infinite charm.
Every piece has a story behind it, be it sleeplessness in Detroit, the customer at Pynn and partner Jane's Brighton café who bequeathed Pynn an overcoat with treasure in its pockets, or the Eastern European gypsy band who, allegedly, diddled Pynn out of his pen at an autograph-signing session.
Whether this is true or not, the resulting concoction of typewriter keys, carriage return, instantly recorded mandocello rhythm and real time fiddle is as eloquent a letter of complaint, albeit too pretty to convey real indignation, as you'll hear this Fringe.
Ends August 30.
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