Review by Steve Bennett

The Rat Pack was never like this. Vegas Nocturne offer such a deliciously awkward take on cheesy show business artifice that they ought to be one of the cult hits of the festival. Yet tonight there are just seven in the audience – and there’s five of them in the cast.

The number of vacant seats does not dampen the magnitude of their peculiarities, the energy of their physical comedy nor the cheekiness of their audience banter. This is a bonanza of uncomfortable interactions and deliberately misjudged jokes – much of which produce well-deserved howls of laughter even with this small crowd.

Our five are led by Ike, a soul singer with vacant smile and vacant mind, and the languor of someone who’s just taken a drink from Bill Cosby. Always holding his own tiny amplifier, like some electronic comfort blanket,he shares the hosting duties with Kasey, a vision in spangly harlequin jumpsuit. Their conversations have the stilted rhythms and desperate, weak banter of two backwater television anchors who’ve suddenly been told to fill for five minutes. It is a delight

Then there’s Tyler, with his weird, nerdy physically and malleably idiotic face. The alter-ego of clown Spencer Novich, he’s primally funny – but chronically underused. You could watch him for an hour alone. Max is, a borderline psychopath with a piercing, manic intensity and a palpable desperation to win back the love of Kasey. Finally Peter Bufano provides the music, though there a subtle comic touches if you watch him carefully, too.

Links are as gloriously nonsensical as Ike’s ballads, while the lyrics of Max’s signature song, Babies In My Butthole, may haunt you for days. The whole atmosphere is just far enough out-of-whack with reality to be compelling yet disorientating, hitting you with weird lines and physical gags from the most unexpected direction. Vegas Nocturne’s weirdness is, however, anchored in reality – rarely does it seem gratuitous, just bonkers.

There’s bit of a lull by the time they get to their bizarre spesh act – a celebrity apple-carving bit. But even so, they’ve got a celebrity apple-carving bit, so it’s not all bad, even if the energy never bounces back to their initial highs. There could also be better interaction between the characters sometimes, as there are sizeable periods where talented comedians are left sitting in the background, doing nothing.

Away from the onstage fiction, Vegas Nocturne comes with a strange real-life backstory. A different version ran in the Nevada resort as part of an immersive Le Clique-like cabaret experience at Rose.Rabbit.Lie, which also featured Piff The Magic Dragon, but it lost $1million a month and became the subject of a bitter lawsuit.

Here in Edinburgh they seem like an overlooked gem, especially for the savvy seeking a smart, distinctive deconstruction of bad entertainment.

Review date: 26 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard