Review by Steve Bennett

Very occasionally a drag act transcends the rowdy pubs and kitsch clubs and makes it to the mainstream… but on the strength of this scrappy carnival of the shoddy, Myra Dubois is unlikely to be the next Lily Savage.

Drag often celebrates the terrible, so it’s no great leap that Dubois – a brusque and brassy Rotherham diva – is an awful children’s entertainer. But beyond that simple premise, she hasn’t really thought.

She’s got a case full of shop-brought magic tricks that she unenthusiastically ploughs through, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not. It worked for Tommy Cooper because he had funny bones beneath that fez, but Dubois  just seems to be going through the motions.

That there’s no stardust on the performance is, of course, the essence of the joke, but it’s done with nothing like the flair needed. You’ll be left pining for a spoof children’s entertainer with  over-the-top dipsomania of Jeremy Lions or the sinister back story of Psychoville’s Mr Jelly.

As well as the cheap conjuring, she insults the audience a bit, sings a song from The Little Mermaid badly, does some stand-up about Rotherham being a bit shit, and scrapes the bottom of the barrel as she gets the audience to play ‘pass the parcel’ for a pound-shop toy. There is nothing more to this perfunctory five-minute time-filler than that.

For her show-stopper, she returns to the magic shop for the banana/bandana trick that frequent Fringe visitor Carl Einer-Hacker has most recently made his own; although it’s a gag that’s been around awhile in any case. She’s got the occasional good line, and sometimes a flash of the sassily dismissive attitude she needs, but overall this is a rag-bag of pieces, any one of which is being done substantially better somewhere in Edinburgh.

Review date: 8 Aug 2012
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms