In my opinion medical professionals should stop making musical one-woman shows at the Fringe. I had thought that You Want Me to Do What? might change that opinion. I was sadly mistaken. The show follows Mary Lou Shriber’s journey through nursing training and her early life before becoming a Broadway star. The plot is dull. Although there are some touching moments relating to her training as a nurse and her job looking after leukaemia patients in Boston, the show’s material is never open to us enough to be anything more than boring.The structure of the show was poor. Shriber shifted from her impenetrable monologue to a variety of songs that seemed to have been picked out of a hat and came with no prompting whatsoever. This is not to say that the performer is a bad singer. In fact, Shriber’s voice is one of the few saving graces of this show. This, alongside her energetic delivery, stops this performance from failing absolutely to entertain. Shriber also has a knack for character acting and the various residents of Boston that we meet are appropriately interesting and different. These moments are unfortunately not enough to save You Want Me to Do What? - the material is not funny and as a whole the entertainment value is as small as spending the night on a leukaemia ward. Guess it’s lucky the show is about that then.
