Star rating: ****
The Highland quest to find a new Scottish musical culminated with the premiere in Eden Court's new One Touch Theatre of the winning entry, the Kielty brothers' high-energy horror fantasy Sundowe. Anyone expecting a conventional West End-style musical from the winner of the Cameron MacIntosh-backed competition should think again. Sundowe is more of an anti-musical.
It is a fast-paced extravaganza that never lets up. Even the mock-serious bits are funny. Verbal and visual jokes fly past almost quicker than we can absorb them, and I lost count of the references to films that the three Edinburgh-based brothers - John, Gerry and James - squeezed into the show.
In brief, the Sundowe is the day when the dead still wandering the earth come back to life in Edinburgh, and only a busking band called The Martians (John and Gerry Kielty and Houston) can save the earth by playing the truest music that will send the risen dead into the light.
They are abetted in this by vampires and by Roothby (Crawford Logan), an ancient human cursed with eternal life, and opposed by the machinations of Madam Godwin (the excellent Cora Bissett) and the Scottish Parliament. Within that framework the plot unfolds in labyrinthine fashion, bursting at the seams with ludicrously hilarious scenarios and songs.
The Kieltys' music works well in the context, and the cast throw themselves into the inventive if occasionally shambolic action with real relish. Hard to see it in the West End, though.
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