Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   “How many of you have seen Sex and the City?” Judging from the response that bounces back at her opening gambit, Candace Bushnell knows her audience. This was the case too with Bushnell’s New York Times column and book that inspired Darren Star’s era defining TV adaptation that over the last quarter of a century set the template for every wannabe girl about town to try and step into her shoes.   Shoes are everywhere in Bushnell’s one-woman show. The stage is lined with a row of them, each pair in a spotlight to call their own and lined up like pretty maids in a row as if awaiting their mistress to give them a twirl.Prior to Bushnell’s entrance, a big screen mash up of Bushnell’s chat show introductions is somewhat surprisingly soundtracked by Leeds anarchist combo Chumbawamba’s 90s crossover smash hit, Tubthumping. This sets the scene for Bushnell’s entrance, a vision in scarlet who sashays her way through a living room set pinker than Barbie’s

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   Like messiahs, some shows simply refuse to lie down. Take Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s half century old rock opera charting the last days of the ultimate people’s pin-up. The show’s most recent resurrection came in 2017 care of Timothy Sheader’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production. Sheader’s reimagining breathed new life into a show that had started to coast on its musical numbers alone, but which was now infused with renewed dynamism and depth.   Eight years on, with a fistful of awards and international tours under its belt, Sheader’s production remains a thrilling second coming, as Rice and Lloyd Webber’s glorious treatise on celebrity, rebellion and how the establishment can create martyrs out of radical chic steps into the post X Factor age.   A network of giant crucifixes become catwalk, dinner table and gallows in Tom Scutt’s set, which Ian McIntosh’s Jesus walks among as a baseball capped and hoodied up hipster with an acoustic

Four stars   Niki King sports flowing white robes offset against a starlit sky in publicity shots for the Edinburgh sired singer’s sixth album. If this image suggests some kind of celestial awakening, the record’s title too hints of personal and spiritual transcendence across a self produced set of songs of strength and heartbreak.   Set to a lush backdrop provided by a band with roots in Edinburgh’s criminally unsung after-hours jazz-soul scenes that King emerged from in the 1990s, the album’s twelve cuts show off the light and shade of love, life and everything that goes with it. This makes for an eminently grown up collection that is by turns reflective, mournful and redemptive.   The opening ‘Soul Route’ is a horn-led statement of intent featuring a core of keyboardist Steven Christie, guitarist Aki Remally, double bassist Paul Gilbody and drummer Stuart Brown. ‘Dreamer’ charts the travails of attempting to navigate around a fickle music business in a song that becomes an anthem fo

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars War, memorial and the mythology of both explode out of Al Seed’s new solo show, which stopped off for a brief tour of duty at the Manipulate festival of visual theatre this weekend following its premiere in 2023. Ostensibly a reimagining of Theseus and the Minotaur story, in which the dashing prince Theseus seeks to slay the half-man, half-bull minotaur and end its killing spree, over an intense fifty minutes, Seed takes this ancient Greek yarn hostage to make it his own.   It begins with Seed standing on top of the platform that makes up the bulk of Kai Fischer’s battle scarred set, with Seed looking like a war game figurine on guard in an Action Man lookout tower. Coming to life twitching like an automaton on a loop programmed to kill, as all men of war are, Seed climbs down from his pedestal to take on all comers and rid the world of the enemy at the door.  Without a word spoken, the electronic clatter of Guy Veale’s score gives Seed’s trip int

The robots are coming in this year’s Manipulate festival of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. As AI technology increasingly takes over the world in a way that goes beyond sci-fi paranoia, Manipulate’s constituency of international performance makers are already playing with the possibilities of hi-tech.   Puppetry, animation and object-based theatre are arguably halfway there already in terms of incorporating non-human players into the mix. Out of this comes an ongoing series of pas de deux between man (and woman) and machine. So it goes with several shows in the 2024 Manipulate programme.    Ruins sees the Megahertz company in association with Feral fuse choreography and digital technology inside a video cube to explore the potential for news ways of being beyond ecological disaster.    On film, Junk Head is a stop-motion sci-fi action thriller set in a distant futurescape in which mankind has forgotten how to procreate, while a human created species has rebelled and developed i

Burns&Beyond Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars   There can’t be many serious contemporary classical composers who end their live shows with a classic pop sing-along anthem, This is exactly what Anna Meredith and band did, however, for their Burns&Beyond festival show of maximalist machine age euphoria delivered with enough Tiggerish ebullience to sound like a Radio 3 rave.   With Meredith currently working on a new album, this one-off show was clearly a treat for both her and tuba player Hanna Mbuya, cellist Maddie Cutter, Sam Wilson on drums and Jack Ross on guitar. Sporting matching jumpsuits that make them look like they’ve stepped out of a 1970s TV ad for minty sweet, Pacers, the quintet launch themselves into an opening rally of the first three tracks of Meredith’s second album, Fibs, released in 2019. Over the next hour, the relentless zing never lets up for a second.   Sawbones is bashed out with Meredith pounding drums like her life depended on it; Inhale Exhale is d

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars Once upon a time, there were three little girls who never dreamt for a minute they could change the world. By applying their passions to everyday endeavours, however, they end up making a difference, finding their voices en route. So it goes for Alice, Jade and Chloe in Hannah Lavery’s play for young people, in which assorted rites of passage and resistance puts the trio at the centre of grassroots activism.   All lined up against the brightly coloured wonders of designer Amy Jane Cook’s Paolozzi style adventure playground set, the trio take it in turns to tell their stories. As their criss-crossing narratives connect, they find common ground and strength in numbers enough to stand up for themselves and their assorted causes.   For Alice it’s being able to run races as an equal. Jade has to square up to racist bullying in the classroom. And Chloe has a small thing of an environmental crisis to deal with. Together, it seems, they can make everythi