You’d do well to wager that no other show in this Edinburgh Fringe begins with an improvised wedding between an audience member hijacked from another show and a shock-headed character holding them excitedly. With ‘officerary’ and ‘mother-of-the-bride’ plucked from our own audience pool, we are all neatly transported into the belly of the Lost Cabaret, where anything can happen and boundaries blur in a haze of possibilities.
A real gem of the spirit of the fringe, Lost Cabaret presents itself as a home for the unusual and mindbending, a space for performance exploration, where you can find surreal prop comedy cheek by jowl with burlesque, the absurd, and regular stand up. There’s an undercurrent of fun and danger, anything can happen. One of the MCs (Two Little Dickheads) is fully nude save for a bounty of white sparkly fur coat and a collection of massive merkins that change in number with each arrival on stage, and the acts can seduce and threaten, world-build afresh every 5 minutes, and lead a joyful chant of “Satan!” giddy with collective delight.
With such short spots there is a playfulness encouraging risk-taking. Melissa McGlensey’s playful ‘motorboat’ burlesque steps away from her political comedy full show, offering a soupcon of a taste of her humour. Whilst Anna Piper Scott’s fever dream of jet lag and sleep depravation offers a differently-tinted spectacles haze to her stand-up that descends into bonding hilarity.
Not for the fainthearted, joyful for the brave, Lost Cabaret is a magical world to be utterly treasured.
BlundaGardens: BlundaBus & Magical SpiegelYurt – Magical SpiegelYurt, 22:40, 5-6, 12-13, 19-20, 26-27 August 2023
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/lost-cabaret-nonsense-in-the-night
