Review by Steve Bennett

Talk about ambitious – or foolhardy. Tamar Broadbent is making her debut in one of the Cowgate Underbelly’s bigger spaces, the 150-seater White Belly, when her comedy profile extends no further than a heat of the Musical Comedy Awards and a small part in Lee Nelson’s BBC Three show.

It’s fitting for the narrative of the show, though, which is about Broadbent’s precocious desire to fast-track her way to the big-time in the music business – with this being her one shot at impressing a powerful producer.

Fact and fiction are most definitely blurred, and not just by the autobiographical nature of her songs. It really does seem like a lot has been invested in this youngster’s Edinburgh debut, but unfortunately it’s on the back of a catalogue of unexceptional tracks.

She’s a middle-class white gal from Surrey,  but not as posh as her RP accent makes her sound, she insists. She fears this background is not the right one for a badass rock goddess, as demonstrated by her jaunty number full of maths wordplay, Good Girls Gone Bad, in which she describes her mild attempts at teenage rebellion.

The perpetually chirpy Broadbent does a rap, too, ‘it’s not just for drug dealers’, she tells us about the genre, but mostly her story so far is told like a High School Musical, where she strives to get the lead part in a college production so the handsome Patrick might get to notice her.

Her lyrics are faintly witty, but not enough to really cut the mustard; and when she tries to put actual jokes in, the strain shows. How many more musical comics will come along who end one line of a couplet with ‘...luck’ expecting the next one to be rude – but it isn’t. It might have been daring in the Fifties, but when you say ‘motherfucker’ elsewhere in the show and no one bats an eyelid, it’s fake and it’s twee to deploy this tired techniques. Similarly, a song about her father speaking only in rock lyrics sneaks the lines in with the subtlety of a car alarm.

She’s got musical ability, that’s for sure. She’s a solid melody-writer in possession of a a great Broadway-style voice, but for all these efforts – and all her jollying us along with clapalongs and calls-and-response – it’s all just too superficial, and certainly not funny enough, to cut it as comedy.

Review date: 4 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett