Rich Hall's Hoedown

“By God there’s gonna be some fuckin’ dancin’ by the end of this night!” threatens Rich Hall grumpily in his buzz-saw growl, after sidling onstage beer in hand. “Forget the last two nights.” Get the impression things haven’t quite been going to plan at his hoedown?

The grouchy Virginian comic has left his country music felon alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw at home this year, but he’s brought his guitar, his piano and a five-piece band for a 90-minute, Crenshaw-style comic song knees-up.

Hall will well know the double-edged sword of late-night musical comedy – on a good night you’ve got a half-cut crowd merrily bawling along, on a bad one, you’re faced with an audience restlessly filtering in and out to the bogs or nodding off into their pints. This show goes the way of the latter more than the former. To speculate as to why, it’s a very uninhibited or very drunk person who wanders down the front to shake their thing in the (tonight two-thirds empty) vastness of the Pleasance Grand. A more compact, clubby venue would surely have been wiser.

There’s plenty of reminders of why Hall is one of the best musical comedians in the business. ‘Big Bad John’, a seat-of-his-pants improvised number about an Australian architect in the front row rescuing a drowning child by redesigning the well he’s stuck in is gut-bustingly funny stuff, and you have to salute the simple genius of reading Dr Dre’s ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’ in a sorrowful country style. But alas, there’s no "fuckin’ dancin’". Make that three nights to forget, Rich.