Edinburgh Fringe musicals reviews: Who Do Ya Love? | Over Her Dead Body | Ripper + more

Who Do Ya Love? | Alex Brenner

Who Do Ya Love? ★★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 25 August 

KC and the Sunshine Band jukebox musical Who Do Ya Love? is the first ATG production on the Fringe, arriving with all the slick razzmatazz one might expect from a major musicals producer. This show has clear West End aspirations delivered with supreme professionalism in a boutique format.

Like the now blockbusting Jersey Boys, Who Do Ya Love? is an origins tale of a proven hitmaking machine who haven’t quite received their due credit in the pop canon. Instead of New Jersey, our scene is the sunshine state of Florida where record store clerk Harry Wayne Casey tangles with life, relationships, sexuality and the Vietnam draft. 

The plot is standard jukebox musical fare – young, bored protagonist dreams of bigger things, seeks support from friends, explores identity and creativity, endures tragedy, makes it big. Wise to this crack, the script comments on rather than plays with the conventions.

Best friend/narrator figure Dee is Casey’s guide - first song establishes the theme, followed up quickly with an “I want” song. “But I don’t want to” protests the protagonist. 

There are a lot of musical milestones to pack into a hour. The effervescent cast of eight barely catch a breath as they press on (without interval) to the second act power ballad. The aesthetic is colourful, camp and retro with ravishing costumes and glitzy pink waterguns to represent Vietnam veteran Orly, whose homecoming is heralded with sequins galore on Boogie Shoes. 

The soundtrack is exceptional, with the stratospheric high notes on Queen of Clubs and the irresistible shimmy of Get Down Tonight providing a groovy reminder that their contemporaries Chic did not have a monopoly on songs about dancing.

Like all good jukebox musicals, Who Do Ya Love? re-introduces a neglected catalogue and makes a compelling case for KC and the Sunshine Band as the disco kings.

Fiona Shepherd

SILENCE! The Musical – The Unauthorised Parody of The Silence of the Lambs ★★★

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 25 August

If the humour and targets in SILENCE! The Musical feel a little anachronistic that might be because this comic musical was first a cult hit on the NYC Fringe in the mid-Noughties when The Silence of the Lambs was still a relatively recent sensation.

The original film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel about a rookie detective sent on a fool’s errand to interview a notorious serial killer was a product of its times, spawning a host of lurid crime thrillers, as well as being understandably ripe for parody.

A flock chorus welcomes us to the action which follows the plot of the film as pacily as our heroine Clarice Starling jogs across stage to her latest assignment. Phoebe Panateros plays Starling in full Jodie Foster lisping mode and a particularly bad wig, while Mark Oxtoby channels Anthony Hopkins’ already hammy performance as her nemesis Hannibal Lecter with bonus fluent tenor delivery.

A number of the songs take their cue directly from the film’s eminently quotable script including a brazenly tasteless riff on one of the more shocking lines. Buffalo Bill gets his own hoedown and there is a flamenco-style psychological dance as Lecter demands “quid pro quo” from Starling, but the source material is so ripe in the first place that mining fresh mockery is a tricky mission.

Fiona Shepherd

Over Her Dead Body ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 24 August

Welcome to the Bluegrass Benediction, a regular radio date for lovers of the old timey sound as rendered by the Appalachian Angels (Ava, Rhonda, Hazel and new girl Emmy) whose harmonies ring out true, soulful and plaintive over the authentic string band backing of the Smokey Mountain Drifters.

Your host Big Willie introduces today’s edition which celebrates the time-honoured folk tradition of the murder ballad, a gothic genre which stretches back centuries to all parts of Britain and Ireland.

These unflinching songs made the trip over the Atlantic to rural Appalachia with their stories largely intact, plotlines which generally involved a young maiden meeting her grisly end at the hands of a violent, spurned lover, often beside a body of water.

The Angels aim to connect to “the ghosts between the notes” to raise up these musical victims of domestic abuse in a séance of song, and get rather more than they bargained for as they are possessed by their performances.

Though the dramatic elements of the show can tend to the cheesy, the singing is indeed bewitching on macabre standards such as Pretty Polly, Matty Groves and Delia’s Gone, conjuring the protagonists who rattle the room to reclaim their lives and identities, to be heard afresh and understood in an age when violence against women is no less shocking.

Fiona Shepherd

Ripper ★★★

Hill Street Theatre (Venue 41) until 25 August

It sounds like a bad taste joke - and, indeed, was treated as one in This Is Spinal Tap - but this rock musical from West Lothian’s Reconnect Theatres treats its subject with admirable seriousness and, more remarkably, is actually good.

A full-length version of Pete Sneddon’s musical which premiered las year this now boasts a new cast - of only four - and has the confidence to treat the horror of the 1880s Whitechapel murders as societal trauma.

This does bend known historical fact considerably as it posits a relationship between the historical figure of Detective Frederick Abberline (Stephen Kerr) and the murderous “John” (Alex Lyne) but it culminates in a final reveal that’s genuinely unexpected. 

Sneddon - who also directs - is bold enough to leaven the grisly investigation with the occasional flash of humour but it’s never arch. Unusually, all the principals are as strong in the musical numbers as they are in storytelling scenes that - while they occasionally go on too long - provide some important character work.

Much of the underlying sense of tragedy is due to presence of Belle Quinlan who has a couple of stand-out songs as the Ripper’s last victim Mary Jane Kelly and gives the show an essential emotional element.

Rory Ford

Edge of Time ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 25 August

Feminist pioneer, free spirit, wild child, non-conformist – Hannah Gavron is admittedly a little-known figure in our social history, but an influential one all the same.

Her research into the frustrations of married women forced into being home-based adjuncts to their husbands – published as The Captive Wife – had undeniable, and ultimately tragic, parallels with her own inability to overcome prevailing male orthodoxy and rise up the ladder of academic sociology.

Gavron is someone that writer/performer Daisy Boulton aims to reinstate in our consciousness, however, with her thoughtful, somewhat earnest solo musical, based on the memoir A Woman on the Edge of Time by Gavron’s son Jeremy.

Boulton is a charismatic, rather ethereal presence on stage, moving in liquid choreography, and delivering her chant-like electro songs with unadorned conviction.

It’s a slow-moving show that traces Gavon’s biography – from ill-advised affair with her headmaster to her own later family frustrations. And it’s very much Boulton’s own perspective on Gavron’s life and premature demise, seen through the lens of a 21st-century counterpart’s similar struggles, though whether we really get to know much more about Gavron or her research, except in very broad terms, is another question entirely.

It’s an interesting area of recent thinking nonetheless, captured in a quietly beguiling show.

David Kettle

Mercury In Retrograde ★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 17 August

New York singer/songwriter Bobby Allan attacks his acoustic guitar with such fervour that he breaks a string. Meanwhile he pushes too hard with his overwrought vocal delivery and his voice breaks under the weight of the angst in which his protagonist, the Fool, is wallowing.

This indulgent one man folk musical riffs on the notion that bad things happen when the planet Mercury appears to be in retrograde with unintentionally comic existential angst, embellished by some shaky technology and whimsical minstrelsy, before wrapping up hastily with the realisation that it’s all an illusion after all.

Fiona Shepherd