Aug 15 2008
Finally! Done something at the festival!
We finally got our act together and saw some stuff at the festival on Wednesday.
Aeneas Faversham Forever by The Penny Dreadfuls
These guys have been steadily building quite a name for themselves, mining the rich seam of Victorian-era comedy. In previous years the show has been sketch-based, but this time there was a reasonably neat plot holding it all together. Lots of opportunity to play up conventions of Victorian melodrama, sinister cults, Holmes detective stories and such. Also, pant-splittingly funny.
The Rat Pack, Live! (I can’t find a link for these guys anywhere… or at least, not a definitive one. Everyone seems to do these Sinatra et al tribute shows.)
A reasonably short show, with three guys playing the parts of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr and three gals as the Berelli sisters. It was one of the harder tribute acts I’ve seen, because the three guys looked so incredibly young. When “Dean Martin” came out drunk and dishevelled halfway through the show he looked more like a rebel schoolboy than a Vegas superstar. Music was still helluva fun though.
Between the shows we went to a restaurant, but ran out of time for a final course. Thankfully the jazz show was quite short and there was still time to nip out for pudding later:
Black Bo’s is a vegetarian restaurant on Blackfriar Street that doesn’t get the popular acclaim of David Bann’s on the next street along. Bann’s is not my kind of place — too cold and severe, I think. Black Bo’s is more relaxed and casual.
I had a bit of problem deciding which of many dishes to have. (Helen went for two starters in the end, if I recall correctly.) Eventually I trumped for the “baby corn balls” because I couldn’t work out what that meant. It turned out to be breadcrumbed balls of brie with lumps of baby sweetcorn inside. Incredibly good.
We visited The Outsider after the second show. I had the chocolate brownie with strawberry shortcake ice cream. It was really good. I wish there had been more of it, and more space in my stomach too! Service was a bit sleepy but so was I. A magic portal back to my bed would have been ideal after all that.