★★★★ Broadway Baby - "Bizarre and delightful"

Thanks to Broadway Baby for sending a second reviewer to our show, and giving us this smashing 4 star review.

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Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre - And So Am I

by Emily Dunford on 22nd August 2014

 

Since forming in 2005 in Aberdeen, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre have performed internationally and on television around the UK. Aided by Puppet Master Kev F. Sutherland who writes their material (yes, there is a man behind the magic), the woollen duo have attracted rave reviews at the Fringe since 2007. The new production, And So Am I, takes a humorous look at the Scottish referendum. Along the way the socks also cover Mumford and Sons and UKIP - a key feature of any 2014 satire.

And So Am I is one of the most bizarre and delightful things you will find at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s very silly, but very clever fun.

This is a silly, laugh-out-loud piece of theatre that anyone with an interest in politics will find funny. There’s a mixture of ridiculous humour and witty satire that carries the show along at a pleasant pace. A slight issue arises when it turns out that the entire audience is either English, Swiss or German, as the referendum debate within the show relies rather heavily on Scottish audience members having their say. This is well-handled, however and there’s never a sense of the sock puppets dying on their (proverbial) feet.

The musical numbers make up some of the show’s highlights, with melodies you may have heard before. An X-Rated sing-along of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has the audience gleefully cursing away and an array of musicals make up the tune to the glorious UKIP song. However, what astounds me most is the stamina that Sutherland shows proof of: he has to keep jabbering non-stop for an hour and maintain a high level of enthusiasm throughout. Both sock puppets have clear personalities and are very loveable, if a little weird.

And So Am I is one of the most bizarre and delightful things you will find at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s very silly, but very clever fun.

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By Emily Dunford elimydunrofd

Musical & Opera Editor Emily has been performing, watching and reviewing theatre for as long as she can remember. Sounds cliched but it's true! She has no qualms in admitting to being a theatre geek and is looking forward to sharing her EdFringe experiences with the Broadway Baby readership.

Socks on Newsnight

Our TV highlight of this year's Edinburgh Fringe has to be our appearance on last night's Newsnight. Okay, it was only a cough and a spit, we didn't get any funny lines in the final edit (we got more into the Edinburgh Extra excerpt, for which the BBC recorded our entire show), but we were featured in the opening montage of the show as well as being in the piece at the end, and it was a fun shoot.

As you'll see, if you catch it on iPlayer before the week is out, the piece involved 8 acts in an X Factor set-up, performing their material about the Scottish Independence debate, some pro some anti, mostly musical, and the ultimate winners performing at the end of the live show. Obviously we didn't win (if we had we'd have had to cancel Thursday night's show, which had a good sized audience, so phew) and the winners were an excellent band of youngsters from Dundee.

So many thanks to the good folks of Newsnight for including us in the line-up, it was a treat.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre ...And So Am I is at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, July 30 - Aug 25 Gilded Balloon, 10.30pm

John Lloyd, Newsnight, friends & family - Edinburgh selfies

This has been the year of the selfie for me, almost inevitably given that I've only had an iPhone since early this year, and I've snapped as many as I could when I've remembered to. The one above must take the cake for most impressive and most surprising. I'd walked out of the gate outside our flat in World's End Close, en route to the So You Think You're Funny party around midnight, wearing the suit I bought for Uncle Stuart's funeral a fortnight ago, and who should be sat there having a fag with his son and a colleague but John Lloyd, legendary comedy producer. We had a very pleasant chat, he has a flyer now.

And here's me with Arthur Smith, Janey Godley and Hannah McGill, at the filming last week of a piece for Newsnight which made it into last night's (Thursday) edition of the show. The Socks' contribution was a cough and a spit but obviously an honour to be part of, and telly is telly and fun to do.

Roman Armstrong and his aunt and a friend. The Socks played Roman's 12th birthday party, now he's old enough to be at his first Fringe.

Sandy and Anne. Sandy Eggo, though I call him my Uncle, is in fact my Mum's cousin, and he and Anne travelled all the way from Brechin just to see me and the Socks. How fantastic is that?

Garry Roost & Nick Steel at the SYTYF Party

Ewan & Vicki Spence

Imaan

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre ...And So Am I is at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, July 30 - Aug 25 Gilded Balloon, 10.30pm

★★★★ one4review - “It doesn’t feel like I’ve done the Fringe unless I’ve seen the Socks,”

A nice 4 star review from one4review, hooray.

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre – And So Am I - 4**** - One4Review

one4review | On 21, Aug 2014

A man in the queue said “It doesn’t feel like I’ve done the Fringe unless I’ve seen the Socks,” and I’m inclined to agree with him. A fringe institution, the Socks have that spark of something different that always feels like a treat.

Although the Socks themselves are, presumably the same pair that’s been going on for years, their material is refreshed each year. It needs to be, as there are plenty of Socks-addicts attending.
The show starts with the audience filing in to Falsetto Socks cover versions, before kicking off with some banter. Being Scottish, the Socks are concerned about next month’s referendum, so they analyse the pros and cons.

A quiet audience didn’t give the Socks all the response they deserved, and England was let down by our failure to list things we could be proud of – things that weren’t actually Scottish, that is.
However, they whooshed on through European elections, various impressions and musical gags. The song-spoof medleys particularly hit the spot – few comedians can slip “Miss Otis Regrets” in quite so seamlessly, and Billy Joel was a delight.

This may be puppetry, but this is not for toddlers (or the easily offended). The wit is too sharp, and the swearing was spectacular.

Reviewed by Gill, 18th August

Edinburgh Fringe 1984 - Young Ones & Fiasco Job Job

In 1984 a young couple visited the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time. These are some of their souvenirs. The photo at the top shows Hev in what was then The Fringe Club and what is now Gilded Balloon Teviot. Regulars there will recognise the canteen area, which is unchanged, except they don't allow shoddily photocopied flyers to be randomly pasted to the pillars. Especially not flyers advertising shows at other venues (New York Stand Up was on across town at The Assembly Rooms, while Teviot itself was host to some shows in The Debating Hall, including John Hegley which we just failed to see because it was sold out on the night we went. 30 years later, Teviot gets divided up into a dozen performance spaces, including one which is a balcony the rest of the year round.)

The tickets are from two of the comedy shows we saw, from back in the days when comedy was only a small part of the Edinburgh Fringe. John Dowie, many people will remember, was one of the founding fathers of alternative comedy, his single My Pussycat's A Punk Rocker, bridging the gap between Jasper Carrott's folk club and modern stand up a couple of years before the Comic Strip and the Comedy Store came to be. His support act, the inexplicably named Fiasco Job Job, were in fact Arthur Smith and Phil Nice, just starting their careers in comedy (Arthur had just given up on being in a pop group that never made it, and Phil Nice's Mum was one of Heather's teachers in Basildon and she'd occasionally seen him there, which was his claim to fame thus far).



In the lower photo, proving that annoying audience members taking photos is not a new invention, we see Nigel Planer as Neil The Hippy, fresh from the last series of The Young Ones, doing a one man show in character, supported by double act The Oblivion Boys, aka Mark Arden and Stephen Frost. As you can see from the Dowie and Planer examples, acts didn't attempt to fill a whole hour with material, even if they were the most famous comics in town, and had support acts sharing the bill as a matter of course. Nigel Planer in particular needed this as, aside from his 10 minute original Neil routine from The Comic Strip and his songs Hole In My Shoe and Try A Taste Of My Wee Wee, his material was paper thin and over-extended. Funny the things you can still remember after three decades. In fact in both of these shows, the support acts were the ones who impressed us the most, being the exciting bright young stars of the future. God, I knew Arthur Smith when he was a bright young thing.

New York Stand Up starred Rita Rudner, who went on to great TV success, and two others whose names, faces and details entirely escape me, sorry.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre ...And So Am I is at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, July 30 - Aug 25 Gilded Balloon, 10.30pm

Mum, There's A Zombie Apocalypse - new comics by kids

The Comic Art Masterclasses have continued while I'm up here in Edinburgh doing the Fringe with the Socks, and here we see half a dozen more brand new comic creations by pupils in libraries in Newington, Morningside, Bonnybridge, Polmont, Port Glasgow and Gourock. Lovely kids, great libraries, and an amazing array of brilliant ideas from all of them.

The celebrities they chose to tread on a worm were Johnny Depp, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Will I Am, Oprah Winfrey, and Leonardo Da Vinci.



Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing Pansy Potter in The Beano, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. He's been writing and drawing comics for 25 years, he must know something.

Best Comedy Award nominees - Scottish Falsetto Socks

Ha-hey! We're nominees for Best Comedy in the Awards. Which awards, you ask? Only the Greater Manchester Fringe Awards!

The Awards took place back on August 3rd and, in the whirlwind of Edinburgh, we slightly missed it. So it's only today that we realised we were one of the five nominees for Best Comedy. Thanks Manchester, we're honoured and flattered.

And that was for an Edinburgh Preview show, by the way. The finished version of the show that we're doing every night this month knocks spots off that show. We can only hold our breath waiting for more nominations.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre ...And So Am I is at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, July 30 - Aug 25 Gilded Balloon, 10.30pm 

GREATER MANCHESTER AWARDS AND WRAP PARTY 2014: ALBERT SQUARE CHOPHOUSE

BEST NEWCOMER: 
Happy Birthday Without You, Paper Mash Theatre at Joshua Brooks, Manchester

Nominated:

Equal Partners - troublehouse theatre at The King’s Arms, Salford

Hacienda Tales - LIAC Concepts at Joshua Brooks, Manchester

Life’s A Gatecrash - PACT Productions at The King’s Arms, Salford

BEST COMEDY: 
Back Door - Off Off Off Broadway at The King’s Arms

Nominated:

James Acaster - Gag Reflex at The King’s Arms, Salford

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre - Kev Sutherland at Taurus Bar, Manchester

Sinful - Carly Tarett at The Castle Hotel, Manchester

Uppity - Misty Chance and Terry Gold at Taurus Bar, Manchester

Lou Lowe

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF SPACE: 
Lulo’s Shitting in Narnia - Lou Lowe performed in a campervan 

Nominated: The Dumb Waiter - performed in the newly opened Lucy Davis Vaults at the King’s Arms, Salford

BEST NEW WRITING: 
Len Johnson Fighter by Colin Connor - King’s Arms

Nominated: 

An Extraordinary Light by Rob Johnston - Breathe Out Theatre at Taurus Bar, Salford

Hacienda Tales by Philip Stuchberry and Sophie Tickle - LIAC Concepts at Joshua Brooks, Manchester

Hardwired by John FK Hoyle - JHC Productions at The Swan Inn, Dobcross

Life Cycle by Adam Sunderland - Sticks Theatre at The Swan Inn, Dobcross

Would You Change? by Rylan Cavell - Bewilderbeastly Productions at Taurus Bar

Jarreau Benjamin (Len Johnson)

BEST SPOKEN WORD: 
JB Barrington - Woodchip Anaglypta and Nicotined Artex Ceilings at The King’s Arms, Salford

Nominated:

Carol Robson, Finding Me, Take Me As I Am - Taurus Bar, Manchester

M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. by Lena Kitsopoulou, performed by Aliki Chapple - The Castle Hotel, Manchester

Money is as Innocent as the Gun - Bar 21, Manchester

BEST REVIVAL OR INTERPRETATION: 
The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, Ransack Theatre, at The King’s Arms, Salford

Nominated:

Be My Baby by Amanda Whittington, performed by Asphalt Roses, at The King’s Arms, Salford

Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness, performed by Yer Maun Productions at Joshua Brooks, Manchester

FASTEST SELLING SHOW: 
The Singular Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, The Swan Inn, Dobcross

Misty Chance (Uppity)

SPIRIT OF THE FRINGE: 
Uppity - Misty Chance and Terry Gold at Taurus Bar, Manchester

Nominated: 

Life’s A Gatecrash - PACT Productions at The King’s Arms, Salford

Meet The Real Maggie Thatcher - Gerundagula at The Swan Inn, Dobcross

The Many Mishaps of Mr Vinegar - Two Boards and a Passion at The Swan Inn, Dobcross

Greater Manchester Fringe 2014 was sponsored by Crabbie's alcoholic ginger beer, Salford City Council, Manchester City Council and Studio Salford.

If you want to stage a show at the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival in July 2015 email gmfringe@gmail.com

More details: www.greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk

Salford Council want Greater Manchester Fringe expansion in Salford: 
SALFORD ONLINE ARTICLE

More photographs by Elspeth Moore: 
http://p-b-e.smugmug.com/Parties/Mcr-Fringe-Wrap-Party-2014/i-GD8M5RQ

Actress Cátia Soeiro Perry, winner of Best Spoken Word JB Barrington, 
Dave Smith (Crabbie's) and actress and comedian Jen Williams. 
Photographer Elspeth Moore

Posted by Manchester Fringe at 03:12