Pink eyebrows, top hat, a magic wand which breaks as it’s dropped five minutes in- this is the uniform of the professional star. Amelia is that star for us, a manic pixie songstress ready to shove Hollywood-style all-singing-all dancing showbizzness down our throats.
I say our, I was one of only three audience members. It’s never nice to feel like your presence is a slap in the face for an entertainer who’s put their life on hold to come up and commit to the Fringe for a month. It’s especially not nice to then have to sit centre stage front row to make the other absent bums less noticeable, and then be squirted with a penis shaped water gun right in my face. This is why I’m a middle-back kind of girl- somewhere nice and cozy and safe from all liquid projectiles.
Showtime! is wild and intense. It’s a bit of a schizophrenic performance of the young, vulnerable English girl Amelia, and her ruthless glittering alter ego, ‘The Master’. It’s loud, dark, chock-full of musical numbers and costume changes. It also features a fully nude re-enaction of sexual violence which I do not think was at all properly signposted in the show’s information section online. If anyone considering attending is sensitive to that subject, I would suggest giving it a miss for this reason.
I hope more people do attend the remaining shows though, such a spectacle demands a more enthusiastic audience than we three could muster. If someone’s willing to strip naked, and also admit to dating a broke OAP as a 19-year-old, someone should be there to applaud their bravery and to catch the wand fragments as they fall.
Showtime!, C ARTS | C venues | C aurora, 19:45, until August 25.
