Edinburgh Festival Fringe musicals review: Gerard Noir | Tickle | Boys in the Buff | Public – The Musical

The sexiest musicals at the Fringe include an innuendo-laden Bond burlesque, some male strippers who reveal a little more than they intended and four strangers trapped in a lavvy. By David Kettle

Gerard Noir ***

theSpace Triplex (Venue 38) until 26 August

Tickle ***

C cubed (Venue 50) until 27 August

Boys in the Buff ****

C cubed (Venue 50) until 27 August

Public – The Musical ****

Public – The Musical

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 28 August

Maybe its the over-the-top emotion, the characters baring their souls (and more) or the unapologetic camp. But there’s something about a certain area of musical theatre that lends itself to the saucy, the suggestive, the positively sexy – as four Fringe musicals demonstrate, with varying degrees of titillation.

Sauciest among them – in fact the downright dirtiest – is James Bond-style spy caper Gerard Noir from Indiana-born composer and writer Jared Schwartz, which brings together a five-strong cast of seriously talented Stateside opera singers. It’s just as well that the delivery impresses, because the show itself is a bit of a mess: an intentionally preposterous tale of our swaggering sex-god hero battling an evil time-controlling supervillain, when all he’s really interested in is bedding voluptuous females or cute males on his globetrotting travels. And in the country that’s surely the spiritual home of sexual innuendo, some of Schwartz’s gags just feel needlessly explicit – as do the couple of Big Reveals from Gerard himself (brave tenor Michael Hewitt) near the end of the show.

There’s clearly nothing remotely titillating – nor gay – about two young near-naked guys tickling each other for the enjoyment of online viewers, right? Or at least that’s what talent scout Davina Diamond (feisty Lauren Wood) claims in order to reassure school-leavers Chris and Callum when signing them to the tickling enterprise run by strutting harridan Tina (Dereck Walker, on magnificently over-the-top form). There are, it has to be said, some toe-curling moments in Chris Burgess’s musical Tickle, and it is a credit to actors David Heal and Owen Dennis as the two youngsters that they go for the physical exchanges with such conviction.

They are accomplished singers and dancers, too: in fact, Tickle’s entire foursome of performers conveys Burgess’s far-fetched storyline with just the right sense of pantomime ridiculousness, even if things swerve sideways into more serious issues of online privacy later on. But for a show that seems to promise voyeuristic excess, Tickle has something to say too about young dreams and exploitation (alongside the voyeuristic excess, naturally).

Heal, Dennis and Wood all reappear in Boys in the Buff, another Chris Burgess creation, which offers us – well, just what its title suggests, really. There’s little attempt to even concoct a storyline in a show whose climax is signposted so explicitly – save shy boy Sam’s reluctance to get his kit off in front of a paying audience, and his fellow performers’ reassurances that it would be a sign of his confidence and self-acceptance.

Boys in the Buff neatly weaves in positive messages about body image and self-belief while keeping its pace speedy and its gags smart, and Burgess’s songs are knowing and memorable, leaving little to the imagination (as does the show’s conclusion). Heal, Dennis and Wood – joined by fellow buff boys Andrew Ewart and Sam Walter – deliver intricate song-and-dance routines with aplomb, and Heal’s rather naive contemplation of a life in gay porn has to be the show’s musical highlight. Silly and saucy Boys in the Buff might be, but it is also a lot of fun.

In truth, there’s little that’s particularly saucy about Public – The Musical from queer-led theatre collective Stroud and Notes. With its set-up of four strangers trapped in a public convenience, grimy might be a better description. But this is a big, confident show, full of memorable rock tunes, vividly conveyed characters that you actually care about and a convincing story arc of conflict, crisis, discovery and acceptance.

Annabel Marlow shines as woker-than-woke eco activist Zo, correcting her fellow unwilling prisoners on their pronouns while keeping quiet about her own privileged background, and Andrew Patrick-Walker playing his lycra-clad biker namesake charts a convincing journey from blustering bigotry to quiet understanding. Hugo Rolland’s Finley is a touchingly fragile but determined creation, and given some soaring tunes to showcase his fine voice, while Alicia Corrales is the voice of reason and balance as lovelorn Laura.

Tara Usher’s chalk-drawn set is simple and functional, but there’s surely potential for a more ambitious production, one with live musicians to accompany the quartet of singers’ superb vocal skills, both individually and as a finely blended ensemble. Most gratifying, though, is that Public embraces all its characters’ imperfections rather than judging them, so that the release at its conclusion feels genuinely joyful.