Musical comedy

A genre on the up, the marriage of music and comedy can be a difficult affair, demanding a delicate balance between listenable compositions, snappy links and, of course, the humour worked into the lyrics themselves. Fest took a taste of the produce on offer this year.

First up is Fringe newcomer and comedy rapper Doc Brown (***), whose Unfamous relates his disappointing flirtation with hiphop stardom. Essentially a nice young man from North London, he draws great mileage from the oxymoron that is "British rap". He is quick to ridicule hiphop’s self-aggrandising guns-and-bitches posturing, counterpointing it with distinctly British humility and geeky enthusiasm.

It’s fertile comic ground, but Brown ends up switching one form of egotism for another. While rap’s bling-encrusted bravado is undermined with ease, Brown’s parodies are packaged in a self-indulgent autobiographical narrative that. Though he's sincere, his life story often fails to captivate. Despite tales of feeling overshadowed by novelist sister Zadie Smith and hobnobbing with Kanye West, the urge to fast-forward to the musical segments increases as the hour progresses.

But when Brown segues into invariably deft and inventively rhymed verses, it becomes clear that this is where the real substance lies. He hits his stride with linguistically artful riffs on nature documentaries and rude-boy slang before initiating a freestyle battle which, given a more cooperative crowd, could flourish into a thrilling piece of audience interaction.

It’s disappointing, then, when a mawkish finale takes the tone of a youth-club ploy to make family values cool. If he were to play on his strengths (punchy musical numbers, not longwinded namedropping) this nearly man of the rap game could yet make his mark on the world of musical comedy.

Things don’t look quite so hopeful for squeaky-clean South African acoustic duo The Brothers Streep (**). A handful of minor chords is about as dangerous as they get, with Dylan Hichens (softly spoken, suited, charming) and Simon van Wyk (suited, charming, softly spoken) sauntering cheerfully through a set of saccharine ditties. 

Their chirpy, impeccably harmonised tunes toy with the financial crisis, supermarket etiquette and Disney’s idealised princesses, but the laughs are consistently thin on the ground. The music itself lacks variation and is rarely used to complement the material it contains. The pair remain watchable throughout and and their centrepiece—a tribute to Anna Paquin, the star of HBO’s True Blood—is a playfully esoteric highlight.

The polish disappears between songs as the Brothers flounder through some hesitant audience interaction, often cutting short each other’s aimless trains of thought and half-hearted apartheid gags. Next to their well-rehearsed songs, this stilted babbling feels lazy. Their apparent ingenuousness could explain the lack of the comedic conceit here needed to tie the show together. But without distinctive personalities and strong material between songs, this highly likeable act fails to make a lasting impression.

The same criticism can hardly be levelled at Australia’s Axis of Awesome (***), whose hard-rocking showmanship is never short on character. They have their group dynamic down to a T: guitarist Lee Naimo as the lanky simpleton; Benny Davis as the gifted stooge on keys, incessantly bullied for his height; Jordan Raskopolous as (by his own admission) a Jack Black-alike frontman with ego enough to dwarf his sizeable paunch. Excess is the keyword as Axis make the most of their encyclopaedic musical knowledge, dissecting a range of genres and stitching them back together as irreverent, well-observed mockeries of sleazy R’n’B, 80s synth pop and Christian rock.

It takes a while to warm to the band’s crudely drawn personas, but as momentum builds it’s impossible not to enjoy delights such as a fully choreographed analysis of boy band clichés and a wonderfully tactless ballad about adopting a senile old man.

For the third year running, Axis of Awesome wheel out their now famous "Four Chords" medley, a masterful routine in which an ever-expanding string of pop songs are shown to adhere to exactly the same formula. It evolves year on year; it has placed the group in the YouTube hall of fame, and it is without doubt one of the few truly special party tricks on show at the Fringe. Axis virgins cannot fail to be thrilled when this appears as the penultimate number, but considering that this—the undisputed peak of the gig—is recycled material, it’s just a shame that nothing else in this year’s offering quite matches this level of ingenuity.