Cabaret & Variety review: Anya Anastasia: Rogue Romantic

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: First rule of the Fringe (or, indeed, life): never mess with a woman who can do a handstand across your lap while maintaining perfect pitch.

Assembly Checkpoint (Venue 322)

***

And if she asks you to pull the party popper embedded in the heel of her shoe, just do it. Because if Anastasia doesn’t get you, her fierce backing band of punky Amazons will.

Anya Anastasia is an Australian singer/pianist/comedian/acrobat – yeah, one of them – with a soaring soprano and a predator’s lust for romance. Anyone in her line of vision could become “one of my one true loves”. “Armageddon laid?” she demands as she shakes her strategically placed maracas on Apocalypso Party.

During a Latino ukulele number, she chats up a couple of potentials from the audience, projecting wildly on to her possible lovers before selecting her ultimate bashful young quarry, gleefully offered up like a sacrificial lamb by members of his party.

Rogue Romantic is the show for lovers of cocktail-based double entendres. Along the way, Anastasia plays the purring, posing Bond diva, the domineering date, the desperate stalker, exploding a few love clichés through the medium of popular comic song before realising the greatest love of all, as Whitney could have told her, is playing solo.

Until 27 August. Today 7:30pm.