Show Rating:

While Rich Hall is spending the festival coolly reading nuggets of comic insight from his literary endeavours, his alter ago/uncle is sweating in the Pleasance Cabaret Bar.

With his Black Liars backing band, Otis Lee Crenshaw appears courtesy of the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary exchange scheme. The Tennessee native pedals his unique brand of country music; not the Stetson-wearing Garth Brooks type nor the unimpressed Shania Twain brand, but the proper kind - a soundtrack to a rye whisky-fuelled night of womanising.

Of course the ladies’ and their charms feature strongly, as Crenshaw pays homage to a dalliance with a bag lady he once had and pleads to a lost love Roberta and her Ku Klux Klan membership (it was never going to work not least because she wasn’t called Brenda, the name of all five of his wives).

The audience interaction is a little tough tonight, with a fantasist at the front who thinks his name is Fosters and that he flies planes, while Crenshaw struggles to improvise a song about (Big Bad) Steve who works in marketing for Johnny Walker.

Elsewhere the rebel lets fly, telling the Disney corporation exactly what to do with its facial hair policy and how he feels about the overbearing presence of Catholicism near the McDonald’s in the Vatican. To counter the anger there’s also a touching confession of youthful awakening from one of the Liars.

Despite the heat and the unhelpful fellas on the front row, Crenshaw nevertheless puts on a show that his nephew Rich would be proud of.

Reviewed by: Marissa Burgess