Review by Steve Bennett

Bridge-Burner is about New York Jewish writer-performer Andrew J. Lederer's unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, such as when Warner Bros wanted to use him as a writer, but he managed to embarrass and insult them out of employing him.

When he comes on stage to make people cry, they fall off their chairs laughing. When he wants to make them laugh, they are sympathetic.

Inevitably, when I saw his show, there were only three people in the audience: me, a giggly girl from Sheffield and a man from Liverpool keen to get to the pub. But we all enjoyed his tales and stayed happily to the end and beyond, because Lederer is a bouncing bald ball of extrovert fun. Making up most of his show as he speaks, it matters little whether he performs to 300 people or three. He can tailor his style and content to fit the situation.

Like all great raconteurs, we actively enjoy hearing about his suffering, which becomes our entertainment because his ability to tell enthralling comic stories is innate.

So we had tales of him crossing Brooklyn Bridge in a snowstorm with a hole in both his shoe and his sock; of him living on the continually-open New York Subway system with no money - you only live on the streets if you can't afford the cost of paying to enter the subway system once. Yet he never hit rock bottom; he never gave up.

On the other hand, he never succeeded either.

He says he spent his adolescence and young adulthood souring relations with the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Carrey. He became a comedian in his teens, acted on TV in Family Ties and Fame, wrote and edited for movie magazines and one movie script he wrote was given its very own chapter in the book The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made.

Lederer is a square peg in a world of round holes and, as his audience of three left the auditorium, the twinkle left his eye.

But he is a fascinating man, a superb raconteur, very funny indeed and his 60 minute show flashed by in what seemed like half that time.

Review date: 1 Jan 2008
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett