A primary set of opinions from the opening week of Camden Fringe 2023 – Ready Steady Crooks!, John & Christian current: Battle Counters and Invasion! An Alien Musical
“You better count all those battles”
It doesn’t take a lot to warmth up the intimate area of the Hope Theatre however it’s value sweltering in there for the new comedian stylings of Ready Steady Crooks! Blessed with among the greatest musical cues you’ll see all 12 months (the ‘Levitating’ montage, the Cardigans second – blissfully humorous!) and a delightfully absurd vein of humour that isn’t afraid of going darkish or slicing near the bone, it’s a vastly entertaining present.
Written and carried out by Benjamin McMahon, Luke Clarence Johnson and Sam Stafford, Head Chef, Sous Chef and Pot Wash reside a double life as high-end cooks and unique robbers. But even attempting to elucidate any of the capers they rise up to is to get on a hiding to nothing. Rest assured that you simply received’t wish to miss Bendy Wendy, or the jar of cum, or the dastardly Fuckit…and so forth and so forth. Highly energetic and brilliantly creative in its zaniness, these are guys to be careful for.
Similarly dynamic and daft was John & Christian current: Battle Counters. It’s a spoof of a sure model of youngsters’s TV, with their acknowledged reference factors being Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Beyblade. Because I’m outdated, I don’t know any of these however for me, it recalled one thing of the He-Man and Dungeons and Dragons cartoons that I watched. Either manner, it riffs off the various tropes of the style with real affection while additionally dissecting it with a deliciously sharp wit.
Again, there’s little justice to attempting to explain the plot. Cal Counters is a small-town American boy, obsessive about the sport Battle Counters! who quickly finds himself on a terrific quest to defeat the evil Count Numbers. There’s viewers interplay, an actual earworm of a theme track, and delightfully deprecating humour from author/performers John Chisham and Christian Loveless which has an actual generosity of spirit to go together with its typically hilarious twists and turns.
Last up on this first week of Camden Fringe for me was Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society’s Invasion! An Alien Musical which didn’t fairly match up, for me a minimum of. Elements of that come all the way down to the manufacturing – a muddy sound stability that amplified music over vocals, sacrificing much-needed lyrical readability even in as small an area as Camden People’s Theatre. And a determined inconsistency in tone pulls us from shouty slapstick to tried pathos by way of raucous rompery with little lasting affect.
With guide by Jonathan Powell and Jasper Robin and music by Lily Blundell, the intention is to pastiche exhibits like Little Shop of Horrors however to ascertain the sort of emotional core to underpin the accompanying alien invasion shenanigans within the area of an hour isn’t any simple feat. As it’s, the destiny of Johnny Fox, a theme-park employee who finds the destiny of humanity in his palms as he does battle together with his childhood toy who is definitely a part of a nefarious alien hive thoughts, feels flatly by-product (as does a lot of the rating) and missing the comedy or acuity to make us have interaction.