Review: EDINBURGH 2024: REUBEN KAYE: LIVE AND INTIMIDATING, Assembly George Square Gardens

“Lady Liberty is hungry but at least she’s looking thin”

From the very beginning of Reuben Kaye: Live and Intimidating, you know you are in for something different than your usual Fringe show. This is something that Kaye acknowledges himself as he wanders through the crowd, declaring that he will be starting with the dark stuff, saying that his attitude is like “they recast Jaws with Camila Parker-Bowles.”.

After a song declaring that “The party’s over,” Kaye tells the audience that we are gathered to mourn and that he will be taking of through the different stages of grief along with his band. He jokes that, because he wrote the show in Australia, audiences in the UK wouldn’t understand his woes, before listing a series of grievances that nearly everyone can relate to. 

One of the main stories that Kaye focuses on is from his experience of being attacked on social media, specifically after a joke he made on live television about Jesus and the time he was in Channel 4’s viral video, “Kids React to Drag.” Even though many of the kids were curious and asking questions, with some being incredibly accepting almost immediately, the same cannot be said for how the Internet responded. Kaye tells the audience about The Activist Mommy, a conservative and religious American Facebook page which began sending him death threats because, as Kaye puts it, “Nothing hates like Christian love.” 

But, even with the dark themes, there are still joyful moments and plenty of jokes to laugh at. In fact, there is a relentless amount of quips and jokes, with Kaye sometimes going a mile a minute in between the songs and monologues. One of my favourite jokes was one in which he tells the audience about how people were worried about what he would tell children about his sexuality, to which he responds, “My ADHD makes it impossible to follow the gay agenda.”.

There isn’t too much audience interaction or crowd work in the show, though Kaye does have a tendency to wander into the audience, caressing people’s faces as he sings and tells stories. One highlight of the brief audience interaction is when Kaye singing about how he’s “gonna build a man, brick by brick” while laying on top of an audience member, serenading them as the audience cheers in approval. 

The show ends on a more sombre note, with Kaye talking about his great aunt, Hannah, who went to Auschwitz twice, and the growing power of Trump in the United States with the upcoming presidential election. However, while these two subjects may be dark, Kaye emphasises the importance of laughing at the things you fear, something he believes is essential to survival. 

Reuben Kaye: Live and Intimidating is an absolutely brilliant hour of cabaret that mixes fantastic and witty comedy with poignant moments of reflection and grief. Kaye is an incredible performer who is able to mix singing, storytelling and jokes into a seamless show.

Reuben Kaye: Live and Intimidating ran until 25 August at Assembly George Square Gardens - Palais du Variété.

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