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Funeral For My Boobs

Òran Mór, Glasgow

Four stars

 

Hannah Howie has something to get off her chest. The clue is in the title of the actress and singer’s new cabaret style show, the latest mini musical to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Howie’s extravaganza is founded on the life changing diagnosis that she had an 85 per cent chance of contracting cancer. She subsequently turned her decision to have a double mastectomy into something she can have a song and dance about. 

 

Howie does this with the aid of her two little helpers who each represent her Left Breast and her Right Breast, aka Georgia and Freda. As Howie struts her stuff all dressed up in suitably funereal black, G and F are brought to life by Kirsty Malone and Gregor John-Owen, who back her up as assorted comedy doctors as well as busting some moves in step with their mistress. Given that each has a personality of their own - Georgia is the feisty one, Freda the smaller of the two - it is only right and proper that they get to do their own numbers, if only just to prove that life really is a cabaret, no matter what. 

 

Chris Stuart Wilson’s production is brought to the stage in association with musical theatre production company Drive Official, and is co-presented with Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh and Ayr Gaiety. This gives Howie and her all singing, all dancing appendages a well deserved longer run at what, for all its showbiz sass, must be something of a purging for its creator. 

 

It takes, well, balls to achieve what Howie has done here in a show that isn’t shy of squaring up to the big C even as she peppers her script throughout with a series of breast inspired puns. Propelled along on Hannah Grace Currie’s funeral parlour set by Stuart Fleming’s piano accompaniment, Howie and co deliver a set of routines as arch as those in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective or Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, two other musical dramas that have life and death at their core. Howie’s boobs may no longer be around, but like all hardened troupers, they left us laughing as they went in a show that sees Howie live to sing for what will hopefully be a lot more days and nights yet.


The Herald, May 8th 2026

 

Ends 

 

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