Cabaret & variety review: Lady Rizo: Multiplied
Star rating: ****
Venue: Assembly Checkpoint (Venue 322)
You get to meet the actual baby during this show. He’s called Tennyson, and he’s breathtakingly cute. I won’t tell you what happens – but I have never seen anything like it before on stage.
Rizo brings you right up close and into a world flooded with maternal love and intimacy. This is a very babycentric show – full of new mother emotion, slightly dream-like and fuzzy round the edges.
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Hide AdLady Rizo may have been struggling with no sleep, disrupted hormones and curtailed freedom, but she hasn’t stinted on her usual glamour. The New York chanteuse and songwriter, who is delighted to be back in Edinburgh. wears a series of fabulous frocks, her platinum hair is judged to perfection, her face is shining and she looks tremendous.
The songs, accompanied by guitar and cello, are a mixture of cover versions and originals, all themed around the theme of maternal love. Rizo is in great voice, belting out rock numbers as well as cooing a sweet beautiful lullaby.
She brings in stories from her own childhood on an artistic commune in Oregon and she’s all about finding new and kooky ways to share the love.
The show has some beautiful visual touches, an onstage costume change inside a giant jellyfish, a clear plastic womb-like umbrella and a number that envelops the audience in a shimmering expanse of parachute cloth.
It’s an extraordinarily emotional show which prompts many in the audience to tears and leaves you slightly dazed at the end.
Some may be squeamish about babies and breastfeeding, but, as Lady Rizo says, we were all in the womb once, and in cabaret we all get to be family.
Until 28 August. Today 6:55pm.