Showcasing everyone from British pole dancing champions to bluegrass bands and a ukulele-wielding redhead called Simmy Starfish (who flashes us with a Support Pussy Riot badge), Aurora Winterborn has evidently sought to find a real range of Fringe performers for her Candid Cabaret. And to help her do so the woman clearly has an abundance of taste. Contending with the overwhelming escalation of cabaret and burlesque shows at Edinburgh this year, Winterborn has surpassed her rivals by scouting out a plethora of one-man acts that combine sexiness and talent with enough good humour to make these two things fun.
Aurora Winterborn’s Candid Cabaret is located in the intimate, mirrored surroundings of the Sapphire Rooms which come complete with a well-used bar and friendly staff. It is impossible for a show here to look slick or grand but with this roughness there comes an audience complicity well-suited to the crowd Candid Cabaret attracts. Looking around the room one sees a colourful and excited audience, leaning against the bar or sitting on the floor to see what delicacies Winterborn has served up tonight.
Winterborn herself is a sight for sore eyes, leaping on stage to help the pole dancer set up, or wishing her performers luck before take the mic. The environment created in the Sapphire Rooms is one of communality and mutual support but all this without the fluffy non-performances that can often accompany too much kindness. “Please welcome Miss Elsie Diamond! One of the nicest women in entertainment!” called the beautiful compere Ophelia Bitz. Elsie Diamond, true to Ophelia’s words, hopped up on stage looking good as gold. But this didn’t last long. If she wasn’t one of the sexiest burlesque dancers at the Fringe I’ll eat her … um.
And the show didn’t stop with burlesque. Almost every evening there was at least one comedian, also tastefully chosen by Winterborn. On the last night the comic and Ripley’s Believe it or Not! performer Tom Balmont made an appearance especially to fit his (well-built) body through a tennis racket – all the time keeping the audience in fits of laughter with his dead pan, off-the-wall jokes.
It is mysterious, the something that holds a cabaret show together. Because of the elusiveness of this substance, it is easy to blame a failed cabaret on an audience’s non-participation. Yet audiences are no irrational beasts. They do participate when the show is good. Indeed they are likely to leave a night with Aurora Winterborn not only having participated – laughed, cried, shivered – but also happily inclined to spangle her sky with stars.
