Usually, the last thing the perpetually single friend wants to do is spend their time surrounded by happy couples, but with married comedy duo Alexander Cabana and Radostina Peteva, I felt I was in safe hands. This late-night hour of audience interaction and stand-up comedy provides an intimate evening in which our hosts dish out a wide - and humorous - range of dating advice for all the lonely hearts in the crowd.
No stone was left unturned in this romantic hospital hour
No stone is left unturned in this romantic hospital hour. From the perils of unrequited love to throwing up on your beloved’s trainers in the early days of your relationship, the couple sail through the trials of its audience with charisma and light-hearted banter, and rarely do a few moments pass without a decent laugh. For a stand-up comedian, opening the floor to your audience is always a risk. That risk increases when you give an audience member a microphone, as they do when it's clear they're playing to a crowd that gives as good as it gets. Still, the duo remains firmly in control, for example, one of the highlights of the evening comes from a wager in which Cabana saunters out of the room and into the adjoining bar, purchasing an audience member a drink in exchange for a dance-off between the two.
Despite the breeziness of the set, which flies by as more of a familiar conversation than a one-way performance, I felt the conceptual strength of the show's framing may have benefitted from a more purposeful structure. Its moments of storytelling were engaging, and I would have liked to see them expanded upon, and the microphone and dance-off segments functioned as highly entertaining, but clearly impromptu, ways of breaking up the more relaxed elements of the show. Ultimately, however, the crowd is clearly rooting for the performers as much as they are for our love life, and overall the show is only strengthened by the spontaneity and versatility of its comics.
