Photo Credit: Blowfish Theatre
With “Trump the Musical”, I was expecting to be reviewing a comedic, risque retelling of the last few years of American politics. Whilst I’m sure that would have been nearly as good as what the actual product is, I’m very glad they went down this route instead.
Instead of the expected politics retelling, I ended up experiencing Putin confessing to burning down Notre-Dame, and Kim Jong-un flossing.
“Trump” is set in the year 2020 – Trump (Polly Bycroft-Brown) is running for re-election, but the story quickly develops past that when Putin and Kim Jong-un (both played brilliantly by Natasha Lanceley) start playing silly buggers with missiles – I’ll leave it at that. Also, Nigel Farage is King of England (Kyle Williams).
Unlike “Brexit”, this show does not feel rushed at all – an hour is the perfect length. It has the same cast – and it was great hearing their voices doing different accents, and most of the impressions are absolutely spot on.
The multirolling is once again, stellar. I’d say the music was incredible, even better than “Now That’s What I Call Brexit”, but some of the humour in this was a bit more on the nose. Things like Trump yelling “fake news” were funny, but very obvious jokes to make, unlike the other very clever humour across both this show and “Brexit”.
The acting was better than the singing, but I actually felt like I was drunk watching it, despite not having a drink, because it was just SO MUCH fun. It is, at it’s core, a glorified fan-fiction, which sounds like something negative at first, but I’d like to make clear it works. It really, really works.
Similar to my “Brexit” review, I thought I’d be recommending this exclusively to politically-minded people, but, once again, Blowfish have gone above and beyond into creating an hour of practically non-stop laughs. See “Brexit” first, because it’s a bit better, but then definitely go to see this.
“Trump” is definitely in my top 5 fringe shows, and if you have a spare hour there’s nothing better you could do with it.
Verdict: 4.9 stars (because it’s marginally less good than “Brexit”) but I’ll round it up to
★★★★★
“Trump The Musical” runs daily at Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose – Other Yin, through to the end of the Fringe at 21:15.
By Lewis Forman