Long Tooth Edinburgh preview at Etcetera
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
It’s Edinburgh preview time in the Smoke again and it’s always interesting. You might see an act which is very close to being a big Edinburgh hit and you might see a train crash; it can go either way. The venue is the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms on the very salubrious Camden High Street, which is running a season of Edinburgh previews. The space is intimate (tiny)and very hot under theatre lights, but very friendly.
Long Tooth is the duo Vivienne Gibbs and Trudi Jackson playing the characters of Liz and Julie who live together, play together and perform together. The duo archetype they adopt is the dominant, bullying character and the buffoon who always manages to subvert the process and gets the laughs in the end, a tradition going back through Laurel and Hardy, all the way to Shakespeare. (more…)
Honestly, I was stone cold sober but I swear that the venue for this gig was inside an upside-down purple cow on London’s South Bank next to Hungerford Bridge, which made for a interesting, if somewhat surreal, setting for the evening. As an impressionist, Jan Ravens has an impressive CV including Spitting Image and Dead Ringers which automatically put her into the “worth a listen” bracket. The gig is part of the ongoing E4 Udderbelly series (which explains the unusual venue) currently taking place on the South Bank.
“Just the Tonic” has found a new home at the Leicester Square Theatre (formerly The Venue) and, apart from a few technical glitches, the relationship looks set to be a happy one. You can’t quite smell the paint from the recent refurbishment but the auditorium still feels very new and the 2 bars inside the auditorium (one either side) work very well for comedy gigs. Drinks are served throughout the performance and the difficult job of getting the audience back to their seats after the interval becomes much easier.
As we approach ten years since the first Futurama episode hit our TV screens it’s fitting that the fourth, and apparently final, feature-length episode comes out on DVD. A lot has happened in animated comedy features in a decade, some of which could be traced to Futurama, but does this franchise still hold up?
