Musicals & Opera review: Sasquatch: The Opera

Sasquatch: The Opera

Summerhall (Venue 26)

JJJ

It’s no great revelation that a bonkers punk-rock opera about Bigfoot composed by Roddy Bottum, the indie film composer and keyboard player in US rock gods Faith No More, won’t be for everyone. But Sasquatch: The Opera has the makings of a Fringe cult hit. As an extra draw, Bottum is in town to play his part in the live soundtrack, delivered by a beefy band with drums, brass and ominously pulsing keyboards.

This flawed oddity concerns a dysfunctional hillbilly family making money from the legend of Bigfoot but when their daughter is out in the woods, she encounters the lonely Sasquatch, a pathetic studyin vibrato, and a left-field interspecies love story ensues.

These scrawny scenes fall flat, like the token banal ballad in an otherwise ostentatious set, compared to a full-bodied falsetto aria on the perils of withdrawing from crystal meth.

Sasquatch is surely the only opera ever to feature a meth lab operation with a chorus of technicians in punky hazmat gear delivering a hit of melodramatic, histrionic tragedy.

Fiona Shepherd

Until 27 August. Today 9:15pm.