Bat-Fan

“This may not be the show you deserve, but it’s the show you need right now,” says James Wilson-Taylor near the start of this passionate and well-crafted tribute to the Caped Ctrusader. If you get the reference, it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy this at least as much as you did, say, The Dark Knight Rises. If you don’t, you may feel like you're crashing someone else's party, but you can still admire the near-obsessive level of commitment on display.

Wilson-Taylor has carried a flame for Batman for as long as he can remember and takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the character’s evolution down the ages. Points are underlined—or undermined—by an impressively weighty collection of PowerPoint slides (“Batman never uses guns,” our host tells us at one point, as a succession of stills show him using a whole battery of firearms), sound clips, plenty of geeky humour and occasional musical interludes that put the comic’s MA in Musical Theatre to good use.

It’s as cheekily irreverent as all good parody. Robin comes in for particular ridicule as Wilson-Taylor portrays him using a small puppet with a squeaky Scouse accent. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze gives us a badly accented rendition of the Disney hit ‘Let It Go’. There is an enjoyably shonky and climactic finale, which mashes up various classic musical numbers to show what the next Batman movie might look like, if Wilson-Taylor were to star.

The humour rarely rises far above the obvious, making this a show that the general Fringe comedy-goer doesn’t especially need. But for fellow bat-fans and musical theatre lovers, it’s as loving and funny a tribute as you could reasonably wish for.