Fringe theatre reviews: Laura Benanti | Desperate Wee Gay Boy | The Spy Who Went To Rehab

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 24 August

Laura Benanti is Broadway royalty. She made her debut as a teenager in The Sound Of Music in 1998, won a Tony Award for her performance in Gypsy in 2008, and has been nominated four more times. On television, she has starred in Nashville, Gossip Girl, The Gilded Age, and as Melania Trump on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

In this hour-long show – first seen in New York last year and subsequently released on Audible – Benanti looks back on her life and career with sly, self-deprecating humour. It is essentially a stand-up show with songs, and while it lacks anything particularly edgy or insightful, it is still a supremely polished piece of musical comedy.

Backed by a three-strong band led by fellow Broadway star Todd Almond - who had a hit at last year’s festival with I’m Almost There - Benanti reflects on how her insatiable desire to be admired has led her into some awkward and embarrassing situations.

Much of it revolves around the men in her life: the older producer who propositioned her as a teenager, the early boyfriends that became famous – she wryly nicknames her vagina “the portal to greatness” – and the two marriages that came and went before she met and wed her current husband. There is a particularly funny section in which she cringes at the memory of her pretending she had cancer rather than reject a marriage proposal.

Winningly frank and friendly throughout, Benanti also weaves in touching sections about her husband and two daughters, plus articulate insights into the stresses and strains of aging as a female actor. The songs are great, too: intricately composed ditties about craving attention, “good” men, and more. And, of course, she sings beautifully.

It is not boundary-breaking stuff, but it is pieced together proficiently and performed impeccably. You would expect nothing less from a Broadway star like Benanti.

Fergus Morgan

The Cadaver Palaver ★★★

Summerhall - Anatomy Lecture Theatre (Venue 26) until 25 August

Christopher Samuel Carroll’s lovingly rendered Victorian caper is both a paean and a pastiche of the adventure novels of yesteryear. Sherlock Holmes spliced with the swashbuckling swagger of Robert Louis Stevenson. Bennett Cooper Sullivan, a rakish adventurer, is drawn into Edinburgh’s murky underworld after an old acquaintance vanishes without a trace. What unravels is a twisting tale masked in mystery, secret cabals, and Egyptian mummies.

Carroll goes full hog, acting, directing, and writing. His script is liberally sprinkled with daft one-liners and garnished with gymnastic wit in a gallant and graceful performance. Each caricature is sketched with the sly exaggeration of a Vanity Fair cartoon, with names as gloriously ridiculous as their owners. The clichés come thick and fast, rendering the plot sometimes more predictable than perilous, but that is the hazard of homage: the tight rope balancing act demands sufficient recognisable tropes with enough of a twist to keep us engaged.

Alexander Cohen

Desperate Wee Gay Boy ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 24 August

Ollie is living the dream as a young Scottish man throwing himself into all that London’s gay scene has to offer. On one memorable night - actually his birthday - he meets his long lost crush from school, goes to his first orgy in a sauna and has a hook-up with a man from Grindr known only as FitBottom.

Ollie is played charismatically by Fraser Kelsey and the audience was clearly loving the character’s audacity and no-holds-barred shamelessness. “I won’t indulge you with the details,” he says, coyly, at one point, but he does - every time. Kelsey is also the writer; this is his debut as a playwright, directed by the award-winning Charlotte Anne Tilley.

Was Ollie’s great night really so brilliant? There’s an emptiness in it he would rather not admit. His various hook-ups want something from him but, more often than not, don’t offer anything in return. Is his desperate pursuit of the next (sexual) thrill preventing him from valuing what’s really important?

Desperate Wee Gay Boy is a simple enough story with a straightforward message, but the encounters are well observed and well written. It’s promising work from a first-time playwright.

Susan Mansfield

Karen Houge: Dreamgirl ★★

Underbelly (Venue 61) until 24 August

A capable, confident performer with an intriguing true story at the heart of her solo play, Norwegian theatremaker Karen Houge just appears to have the tone all wrong in the telling of it. Sold as though this were a burlesque show on the theme of trust, she appears in dazzling showgirl regalia, but then quickly shrugs this off and instead gets into a story about accompanying a group of Syrian refugees across southern Europe.

Frankly, this is very interesting, and hearing more about this journey would certainly be of interest, but too many digressions into stints of tangential audience interaction and vaguely related Lego-building constantly rob a promising play of momentum.

David Pollock

The Spy Who Went To Rehab ★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 25 August

Special agent Simon Cross is a heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, compulsive-gambling womaniser in the style of James Bond. His outdated ways have become a liability, though, so he has been sent to rehab, where, surprisingly, he starts to see the light. Martinis are replaced with meditations, pistols with Pilates, self-destruction for self-discovery.

US Greg Ostrin’s five-handed comedy entertainingly skewers Ian Fleming’s problematic superspy through therapy sessions, unexpected face-offs, and a delightfully double-crossing finale. The clunky staging lacks polish and the performances are laboured, hence two stars, but there is the spark of something seriously funny here.

Fergus Morgan

Bitter Baby ★★

LeMonde (venue 47) until 25 August

There’s a work-in-progress feel to this production, unsurprising given that writer Elis Pear stepped into the role just days before the Fringe run. Commendably, she tries to make it work, and there’s promise in her writing, which includes honest reflections and moments of humour.

The story of an academically strong woman turning to sex work to make ends meet is intriguing, but the piece struggles under unclear direction and static staging, with Pear seated almost throughout. Emotional scenes use unnecessary music to heighten feeling, which is a shame, as this is when Pear’s performance is strongest. It reflects the sheer determination behind many Fringe efforts, but it doesn't quite come together.

Suzanne O'Brien

How to Become a Movie Star? ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 23 August

The title is meant as a question but it also might serve as a warning. This autobiographical one-woman show by Sarah Maria Lafferty — who is not yet a movie star — documents her first experiences of becoming the centre of attention as a child through to drama school and travelling to New York in order to meet her hero, Gabriel Byrne.

Mr Byrne’s name is invoked so often as to become an incantation, and you may leave this without ever wanting to hear it again. Lafferty may well be a fine actress, but she’s not a gifted memoirist and some of her anecdotes wouldn’t be that interesting even if they happened to you.

Rory Ford

Chameleon ★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August

There’s no doubting the talent and ability of young actor Ruben Sparks, whose solo show sees him inhabit a confined psychiatric patient named Delaney. The chameleon of the title, with a creepily impressive impersonation of the creature to go with Sparks’ many other abilities, Delaney recalls his troubled family history, acting out the various sibling, parental and other parts, often in dialogue with one another.

Although Sparks’ central performance is compelling, there’s an impressionistic vagueness to the text and the too-similar voices of each character, meaning the audience has to work hard to keep up with the storytelling.

David Pollock