RT @Review: #Princess Cabaret *****

If Twitter has a royal family, the girls from Princess Cabaret are certainly first in line for the throne (perhaps that makes Chris Cox Prince Charming...)

After a clever and blanket marketing storm using everyone's favourite new social medium, this talented troupe of Australian comediennes have created an unmissable buzz this year, even featuring in the national press as doyennes of tweeting, hashtags and followfridays.

A newly-awoken Sleeping Beauty is trying to come to terms with the modern world. Jasmine is increasingly tired of Aladdin's laddish ways. Belle kind of misses the Beast, now he's back in human form. Cinderella's having identity issues, whilst Snow White has developed some rather disturbing psychotic tendencies. Ariel's just a fish out of water, whilst Tinkerbell is distraught at the fact she's only a fairy...

Princess Cabaret has a brilliant conceit - dragging the Disney heroines out of their happy-ever-afters and into the real world - and the girls execute it well. The put-upon Tinkerbell in particular shines as a narrator of sorts, providing musical interludes on her keyboard as the other princesses rush from one sketch to the next.

Some of this is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny and the humour gets more risque as the show progresses (some of Aurora's political incorrectness is the sort of thing Jerry Sadowitz might even blush about...) and the girls carry it off with style and energy in a mixture of sketches, song and dance routines.

The climax (word intentionally chosen) is absolutely hilarious and the whole show lives up to the buzz surrounding it, meaning you'll not be disappointed by it if your curiosity's been pricked by the Princesses.

I would perhaps have given the show four stars as it stood, but as an example of how acts like this can rise to the top through their own promotional savvy, Princess Cabaret deserves an extra star - perhaps one retweeted by the legions of followers they have now accumulated.


Princess Cabaret runs until Aug 31st at the Gilded Balloon. £7 (£6 concession)

Twittering the Festival

Around this time last year, I started scouring the web for any Edinburgh Festival and Fringe tidbits I could find. Using a combination of the usual suspects (the Fringe website's message boards, The Scotsman, etc) and some more "webby2.0" ones (saved Google news searches, RSS aggregators, etc), I was able to glean some nuggets from the mass of internet noise out there.

This year, although the same sources are there, it's different. I've been alerted to news about shows I may never have considered, arranged some photoshoots I'd probably never had the chance to do otherwise - heck, I've even won a limited edition EIF cloth bag.

And the source of this endless stream of topical and inside news?

Twitter.

Quite simply, the Edinburgh Festival and all its associated chums have embraced Twitter as the method of advertising and PR this year. Whether it's the "official" tweets of @EdinburghFringe, @edintfest and @TheFringeThing; the twitterings of venues such as @lyceumtheatre and @Universalarts; the performers like @falsettosocks and @tomfoolery09; or the review sites and blogs such as @FringeReview and @allthefestivals. Even the tweets from people excitedly discussing Edinburgh Festival and Fringe shows that turn up just because their posts mention the words.

The internet has long been a great leveller, allowing people to be able to get their message out there with the minimum costs and hassle, but the Twitter explosion seems to have stepped this up a gear. I'm finding it a fantastically rich source of all things Festival and am already experiencing that slight panic when I'm not able to check my feeds for anything longer than a couple of hours. So keep on tweeting, Festival twitterers, you're doing a great job.

Heck, even a link to this blog entry will probably end up there before the day's out.