Review by Steve Bennett

The neatly turned-out Brothers Streep have come all the way from Cape Town… but haven’t brought all that much with them.

Their comedy songs are formulaic and underwritten, taking one germ of an idea and stretching it out to three minutes. The best musical comics produce lyrics that could work alone, but it doesn’t happen here. If a stand-up came on and said ‘don’t you hate it when someone gets into the 10 items or less queue with 11 items’, with nothing to back it up, you’d feel very short-changed. Setting the same flimsy idea to a guitar accompaniment doesn’t improve it.

In fact, if anything, it makes things worse. If you base a song on a single joke, as they often do, once the verse-chorus repetition has robbed the gag of its surprise, there’s nothing left but to sit patiently and let the song play tediously out.

The brothers –not real siblings – came to Edinburgh following a fleeting appearance on Graham Norton’s chat show, when he played a video of their song about Anna Paquin and her film career to the actress herself. It’s by far the best number, making the supporting tracks only seem like a disappointment. Rather than being able to springboard into better things from that TV exposure, they appear ill-prepared to sustain a full live show.

It’s a shame as they come across as personable young men, and certainly have a very engaging manner about them, but that’s not what wins acclaim when there are hundreds of shows from which to choose.

Review date: 15 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett