Lily Blumkin, Gilded Balloon @ Patter House ★★★
Lily Blumkin has always planned to be a big-time comic, she tells us. So when her parents downsized and asked her to clear out her childhood bedroom, she went through her stuff – photographs, toys and other oddities – to curate the future museum dedicated to her life and work.
That bit of chutzpah is the neat construct of Nice Try, in which the Brooklyn-based Daily Show writer and performer tells us the story of her childhood. She plays all the characters who appear here – among them her first boyfriend, her first girlfriend, her dad and the rabbi at her bat mitzvah – and, like most character comedy shows, some work better than others.
The strongest characters are her first boyfriend, Jeffrey, and the rabbi, closely followed by her dad.
Jeffrey is a crass teenager less interested in making out with her than hanging out with his best male friend. His braggadocio, evenly matched by his teenage awkwardness, is suitably cringe, while the rabbi, newly graduated from a stand-up comedy class, steals her thunder at Blumkin’s bat mitzvah, cracking jokes and insulting her prowess in Hebrew. Her dad, meanwhile, on learning Blumkin is gay, goes overboard on the rainbow ally bit after "visiting gaydads.com".
Blumkin has oodles of charm and her Fringe debut starts strongly. But the pace is uneven and there’s a slight whiff of drama-school audition about some of the less successful material. When it works, though, it’s funny and touching and hits the spot.
Shamik Chakrabarti, Gilded Balloon @ Appleton Tower ★★★
This is Shamik Chakrabarti’s international debut outside India, and he is a warm presence on stage, doing some gentle crowd work to ease us in to Despite Appearances.
He talks about his odd football injury, visiting a safari park and the dangers of learning to drive in India – “traffic lights are just colours” – before he embarks on the story that forms the spine of the show.
It’s a lengthy – perhaps too lengthy – shaggy-dog story involving a lost laptop, the state of policing in his adopted city of Mumbai and why he has to admit to being a man-child. He certainly looks the part, he says, laying on the awkward charm.
Chakrabarti creates a world that’s part fantasy, part reality, and there’s pleasure to be had in working out which is which as he describes his Herculean efforts he made to find his laptop after leaving it in a tuk-tuk.
He adds to the tale layer by layer, peppering the story with some decent laughs and interacting with the audience as he goes along. His style is laid-back, dry and self-deprecating, and many of the details reappear as clever callbacks. He’s an accomplished storyteller and this is an engaging debut.
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