The Trouble With Asian Men/(I am) Nobody's Lunch

Sam Marlowe at Soho, W1

So, an actor asks the audience, what is the trouble with Asian men? “Their mothers,” comes one response. “Lack of a six-pack,” comes another. “They run away at the first sign of trouble,” remarks a woman with quiet seriousness. These and other issues are discussed in this hour-long verbatim piece, created for the Asian company Tamasha by Kristine Landon-Smith, Sudha Bhuchar and Louise Wallinger and first seen in November. A quartet of actors use recorded interviews, which are played into their earpieces and re-spoken to us complete with the vocal idiosyncrasies of the original speaker.

The method has limitations. The non-stop playing of the recording into the actors’ ears means that they cannot pause to accommodate an audience response. Sometimes their faces go blank with concentration; and Landon- Smith’s production is somewhat static. But there’s an undeniable authenticity about the conversations — even if they yield few fresh insights.

We hear about sexism and homophobia, of dictatorial husbands, inflexible fathers and mothers. There are accounts of lives divided between a traditional role at home and a modern Western one outside it. There is a touchingly comic tale of a Sikh who realises he wears a turban for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, and bids farewell to it, and to the hair he has never before cut, at Vidal Sassoon.

The New York cabaret company the Civilians also use a verbatim approach, albeit a more fluid one. (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, winner of a 2006 Edinburgh Fringe First, wittily considers the impossibility of certainty in a world stuffed with lies. Snappy songs and scenes drawn from interviews with various fearful citizens muse on the unknowable realities behind news headlines, tabloid gossip and political spin, underscored by the mewing of Schrödinger’s Cat, which may or may not be imprisoned in a suspect package abandoned on the stage. The show doesn’t have the intensity of the company’s last UK outing, the post-9/11 Gone Missing, but it’s an inventive and provocative exploration of the 21st-century condition.

Box office: 0870 4296883

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

Robert Dawson Scott at Assembly

There are a lot of Americans in Edinburgh this year wondering what happened to their country. They don’t recognise a land dominated by religious fundamentalists — though, given that the Pilgrim Fathers quit England early in the 17th century because they thought it was a degenerate den of iniquity, perhaps they should not be so surprised.

But from the youthful, confused exuberance of Particularly in the Heartland, by the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment at the Traverse, to the cynical Levelland by the comic turned playwright Rich Hall, they clearly are having trouble connecting the land of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July with the world of Rush Limbaugh and approaching Armageddon, in which so many Americans apparently believe.

Perhaps the only form grotesque enough to encompass the confusion is cabaret. (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, from the Civilians company of New York, has a script as sharp as a tack, clever songs, five terrific singer/performers led by the flame-haired Caitlin Miller, one pianist and a candy-striped set like a fairground tent.

What makes it all the more piquant is that almost everything said is based on verbatim interviews with Americans who were asked why they believed what they believed, mostly, though not exclusively about current events. The title comes from one particular line of thought, that we may all be some alien creature’s putative midday meal (belief in little green men is almost as widespread as belief in God in the US).

If the script is sharp, the music (by Michael Friedman) is sharper still. Even the harmonies have a fractured quality to them, reminiscent of Kurt Weill, putting one in mind of another time when cabaret flourished, the imploding Germany of the 1930s. My, how we laughed at the satire of the madness of the times, just as we laugh now.

Fringe sixpack

If you want to binge on the fringe, Avril Lennox offers up six of the finest musicals

Ben Elton — The Musical, starring Dan Thomas, Green Chicken Curry Productions, Gilded Balloon, Aug 2­-28 (not Aug 15)
Easy targets, we love ’em. What more tempting a soft underbelly to rip into than that of the wet-lipped former scourge of “Thatch” now cosying up to the Establishment and making a mint with his populist West End singalongs? We’re not entirely convinced that Dan Thomas is up to this long-overdue task, with his amiable parody of musicals studded with 1980s pop hits, but if it causes Elton a minor twitch of mortification in his diamond-studded mansion, it’s worth the admission money.

Improbable Frequency, Rough Magic, Traverse Theatre, Aug 4­-27 (not 7, 14, 21)
For years we’ve complained there are no musicals about John Betjeman, Erwin Schrödinger or Flann O’Brien. They force-feed us speeding steam trains, singing felines and the French revolution, when all we wanted were poets, physicists and satirical novelists. Now Dublin’s Rough Magic has answered our prayers with a wartime comedy in which the future poet laureate, the atomic theorist and the political satirist come together in a world of spies, subterfuge and tense Anglo-Irish relations.

Into the Hoods, ZooNation, Udderbelly, Aug 5­-28 (not 15)
Stephen Sondheim, he’s like so 20th century, innit. What da kidz want is summit a bit more urban, nowarramean? So the young dudes at ZooNation have got themselves some cool beats and turned the fairy-tale pastiche of Sondheim’s Into the Woods into an MTV-style hip-hop song-and-dance spectacular that’s really cookin’. Into the Hoods is a family-friendly musical full of wicked old skool, R&B and Motown grooves that’ll leave you spinnin’ on your head.

Three Mo’ Tenors, Assembly St George’s West, Aug 4-­27 (not 8, 15, 22)
Fancy something operatic but not ready to go the whole Pavarotti? How about three African-American tenors in dinner jackets who are just as happy getting their tonsils round jazz, gospel, soul, spirituals, Broadway and the blues as they are the classical canon? Hitting Edinburgh from Chicago, the show gives a black spin on the Three Tenors format, warming you up with Verdi and Donizetti before hits from Les Mis, Five Guys Named Moe and Ragtime plus tributes to Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and Gladys Knight.

(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch, Civilians, Assembly Rooms, Aug 4-­28 (not 14)
Everyone’s doing verbatim theatre this year — lots of angsty stuff about Iraq, prostitution and serial killers based on real-life testaments. Give us a break. What we want is cabaret. Cue the Civilians, a young New York company that has invented a weird offshoot to documentary theatre. They go with tape recorders, quiz the public on the pressing issues of the day and turn the answers into song. Look out for the touching ballad about the abandonment of civil liberties.

End of the Rainbow, Assembly Hall, Aug 4­-28 (not 7, 14, 21)
No doubt there’ll be a score of drag acts doing their take on Judy Garland at the fringe, but the tribute show you’ve got to see is by the singing sensation Caroline O’Connor. The show looks at two sides of Garland as she struggled through a series of performances in 1969 in London. O’Connor, a UK-born Broadway star, had a huge fringe hit with Bombshells two years ago.

Gone Missing

by Sam Marlowe

In our hectic modern world there are many ways to lose things, and many things to lose: the will to live, the plot, a war. These and others are explored in this slick cabaret piece, the UK debut of the acclaimed New York company The Civilians, which combines verbatim text from interviews conducted by the cast with fiction and song.

Gone Missing, by Steven Cosson, Peter Morris and company members, with songs by Michael Friedman, was created in the wake of 9/11. Its approach to the terrorist attack is oblique, but the shadow of the twin towers — themselves now a memory — falls across even the most apparently trivial or amusing anecdote, lending it a darker poignancy.

On Takeshi Kata's blue box set the cast of six, in city-slicker suits, weave tales of the misplaced ranging from the mundane to the mysterious. An everyday story of a man who loses his mobile phone and tries obsessively to track it down shows not only how much of ourselves we invest in our possessions, but also how much of our lives we wasted acquiring and attempting to retain them. At the other extreme, a comically grisly account by a streetwise cop of finding a decomposing corpse missing various body parts is a jolting reminder that even our physical selves are ultimately only objects, capable of drifting into oblivion.

The show tangentially connects such ideas with the philosophy of Freud and Plato, and the myths of Atlantis and the Sargasso Sea, reinforcing the metaphor intermittently with gurgling sound effects and slo-mo choreography by Jim Augustine, so that the cast sometimes appears to be performing under water.

This witty treatment of weighty themes extends to Friedman's stylish songs, performed to piano accompaniment by Duncan Wisbey and occasional acoustic guitar. With their wry comedy and sense of yearning, these are sometimes reminiscent of US songsmiths Maltby and Shire. And in their evocation of the unreliability of memory, they recall the haunting Remember? from Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Then there's Hide and Seek, a wistful Suzanne Vega-type song about lost opportunity, which includes a lovely lyric in which the singer recalls "when I knocked my mothers perfume off the shelf and smelled for weeks like I was going somewhere".

Elsewhere, there are power ballads, jazz-inflected cool, even German lieder and a steamy Latin number — something for everyone, in fact. A show about the stuff of life, and the life of stuff, this is a thing of beauty. Go and see it.